1. |
Temple Of Victory
05:20
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Fireworks and canisters
The hoisting of colours
A crossing of futures
and rafts of despair
Fireworks and canisters
an arson of memory
coded histories
A Temple of Victory
Carrying the lie of a borrowed mind
the hoisting of colours, sculpted by fear
In honest work preserve the beauty
Of agony, a path of glory,
Behind the callow smear
and parades of ecstasy
is weakness sewn in costume
and buried in conceit
A triumph of distrust
and the mould of deceit
Your Temple of Victory
…trumpeting irony
and the cloak of defeat
Fireworks and canisters
The certainty of solution
in beaches and carcass
a proud sea of nameless bodies
And they have convinced
that each one dredged
is another’s distant fault
The fated convergence
of how it is and how it was
And they have convinced
that the rot starts
in the guts of the hapless poor
Kneecap and humiliate,
annihilate the promise of more
A gutless sketch in God’s image
Christ’s shafted whipping boy
Hung from the gallows of The Mail
Stripped of purpose, polluted meaning
Concrete poverty, fictional glories
… Your Temple of Victory
A life’s work of terminal redundancy
Kneeling and weeping
at the Temple of Victory
Tears of confusion
a lonely island drifting
Grotesque and broken
Your Temple of Victory
Ornaments of fantasy
Your Temple of Victory
A futile legacy
Your Temple of Victory
The mould of distrust
and the romance of deceit
A futile legacy
Your Temple of Victory
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2. |
Survival
02:49
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An indifferent sun will mock this land
Each breath choked by rising tides
The displaced caged and farmed like cattle
Humanity waged against the numbing of time
Is this survival?
Waiting and hoping
Is this survival?
Accepting despair
Nature’s peace will consume
Denial lights the coward’s way
towards obliteration
Sold as a spectre, but fed on a drip
Crushed by the sanctity of capital worship
Hollowed out and left to spoil
Beneath the pavement there is no beach
Is this survival?
The monotony of talk
Is this survival?
Accepting despair
With silence and inaction we bury the spark
That tomorrow lies in flux, this is just the start
Will you submit or learn to fight?
And celebrate violence as a binding tool
Fracture and puncture, dismantle the facade
It’s the only war worth fighting for…
Submission to profit will swallow the earth
From pipeline to factory rupture the heart
Resist indifference, this is survival
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3. |
Devotion
02:17
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Does the blood and heritage
keep you warm at night?
Well I guess it masks the smirk
in the space pushed between us
Pride and spangled stories
paint the mirage of content
to starve or freeze, beg and please,
for the illusion of choice
From all the years of circus
how have you missed the joke
that piety and reverence
twist the rope from which you’ll choke
Another nurse, another dreg,
another future washed up dead
Gather all the scapegoats
to keep the doubts fed
and Britannia in your head
Paraded all in blind devotion
Scab’s reward in blind devotion
All the drain and managed pain
and still the shutter keeps its chains
Delusions and deficiencies
behind a saviour’s smile
Pure tragedy with no direction
just a figment of exception
Gather all the scapegoats
to keep the doubts fed
and Britannia in your head
Marching on in blind devotion
Scant reward in blind devotion
And so you spew with conviction
monuments to desperation;
deaf to the sound of the obvious
… in blind devotion
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4. |
Liberty
02:07
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Kings colours, stars and stripes
and the blister of phosgene mornings
Liberty built on a million dead
Through the cold eyes of profit
Freedom reclaims all
Liberation through devastation
Flesh torn, corroded thought
The road to success
paved over skulls of infants
Promised paths now silhouettes
and charred across the smouldering rubble
Bow your head, place your pride
in the rows of makeshift crosses
Again, again and again… until the well runs dry
Plundered in peace, served up in war
Morality’s knife switched around the back
Another carpet bomb in the colours of a rainbow
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5. |
Discipline
05:22
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Etched in closing worlds
of promise and certainty
Iron and concrete piled in shadow
Where possession preys
on impoverished thought
Decimation for productivity
Stunted by fear
and ordered anxiety
We feed on the necessity
to plunder flesh and earth
for surplus we will never see
to pursue desolation
for a “broken” system
warped in a divining mirror
Leathered skin and thinning air
Throats narrowed with thickened ash
How could it be more clear?
That the dirt we churn for others
Forms the ditch they’ll turn us in
Driven down to ligament and bone
Decimation for productivity
The way has narrowed
The weight of old
has shed its meaning
The way has narrowed
Capitulation or discipline?
Tracsend presumption
Free our minds
from their prisons we built
Abolish your co-operation
Grind away their fallacy
Crush the abstract parasite
and all its obfuscation
Butchery, murder, prophets of rot
The falling sky leaves no room for talk
But these hands of struggle
will answer the call
Profit or life?
Profit or life?
Profit or life?
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6. |
Retribution
01:53
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Through the stolen hours
and all the mangled strain
There is latent power
in each and every day
Smash the clock, suspend the lie,
down the tools that pacify
And with the grace of a sickle
reap everything they stole
Because these days are ours to take
Seize them with union, love and rage
Reach beyond division,
no more participation
The tainted walls are fraying,
time for retribution
With the glint of our revenge
sow a seed into the soil
and from the ashes of indignity
watch each other grow
Because these days are ours to take
Seize them with union, love and rage
Picture their fall, don’t let it fade
Build them free of rot, free of hate
Organise your pain, don’t take the bait
Picture their fall, don’t let it fade
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7. |
Guilded Cage / Sanctuary
05:31
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Decency torn and
bludgeoned in the name
of divine growth
Trauma taught as nature
The deserving take the worst
Freedom in the gilded cage
Security and sanctuary
Furnished out of view
Austerity’s ruin drifting in the static
Strung out in wake, conditioned for defeat
Flowers of change
poisoned by myth
Forever in sight
held beyond reach
Robbed of support and solace
Across a lifetime of drip-fed shame
Complicity builds their sanctuary;
our freedom in the gilded cage
__________________
In the haze of someone’s prosperity
Count the boarded shopfronts
and eyes glossed with grief
the promise of fulfilment traded for the currency of brutality
to grind you into insignificance
chasing history’s tail
Hoodwinked and atomised in pursuit of the self,
degraded and marooned by greed
Separation will set you free
Nailed to the cross of despondency
Farce and distraction conceal the blade
Worked into abstraction: poorer, wearier and more alone - the frictionless innovation of destitution
40 hours to watch them starve and smile to hide the shame
on the kitchen floor of another buy-to-let
Dopesick or jobsick?
Playgrounds of landfill and rivers of human shit
Standing outside my body, chasing time and where it went
But hoarded gold will one day turn to dine on venal flesh
Visualise a future beyond this gilded cage
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8. |
Vacant Paradise
02:59
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Behind the vanity lies disdain
Spineless forfeit to play the game
Total surrender to pre-fab culture
Spent at the alter of opulence
Buy your assurance to cloak the denial
Swallow and smile knowing the lie
Submission to mediocrity
Whatever it takes to shine…
Pious Middle England
The warmth of uniformity
Gutted of self-respect
for a vacant paradise
A picture of desperation
Cowardice thrives in accumulation
Exploitation to mask the doubt
Whatever it takes to shine…
Conformity to shake the dread
Imprisoned by expectancy
Freewill surrendered to sanitise
and wrapped in delusion to soften the cry
While millions starve you turn away
Sedate your guilt for another day
In the pits of this festering isle
merit will absolve all blame
Gutted of self-respect
for a vacant paradise
With integrity shorn for a ritual of spite
Bask in the chasm of another plastic life
Pious Middle England
The warmth of uniformity
Gutted of self-respect
for a vacant paradise
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9. |
Idolatry
03:11
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Chastened and deprived
Why cling to this disease?
To dance in their halls of fetid worship
and be carried on the wind
of centuries-dead men
Reaching for a past
stitched with deception
The dependency of suffering
The duality of pain
Why do we lionise
to be scraped of our dignity
when fed such abject poverty?
Why do we go crawling back
into the graves of icons?
The dependency of suffering
The duality of pain
The path has long been written
of piss-weak agitation
…succumb and be disgraced
and still we scrap for servitude
Subsistence gleams like wraps of foil
so we trample one another
inside the walls of tradition
The dependency of suffering
The duality of pain
History‘s lifeblood
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10. |
Contempt
05:38
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Beneath the lacquer, between the lathe
laughs the con that gold drips from effort
not drained from the hours
of those on the scaffold
dragged to meet their fate
And did it shine for you?
Asbestos dreaming
blackened lungs
another empty week
tracing comfort in the stasis of a debt
the trickle down of acid rain
Contempt is the weapon sharpened since birth
Contempt is the leveller laced in their truth
Each shattered morning no colour or meaning
in coke-drip shards and hollow leanings
cogs turn as intended with faceless abuse
Behind the fiction lies a map of intent
A triumph of vision in their hiss of suspicion,
the drum of strife and fractures in time
Payments of shame, beleaguered and broken
Behind the fiction lies a map of intent
Contempt is the weapon sharpened since birth
Contempt is the leveller laced in their truth
Is this the house we really built,
or just the ruin we’re forced to bear?
Peeled and scabbing
maimed at its foundations
kept together with compassion,
endless toil and tears of hope held in the gut
Our labour sold so short, the pain and loss
fed to the instruments of partition
Blistered hands and splintered minds
while walls of glass and steel rise;
gifted by the spoils of all our time
So if this is to be the last call before the fences climb
dismantle their contempt because there will be no peace without violence
Harness the anguish of our collective memory
and fight with an open heart and sharpened mind
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IRON LUNG Records Seattle, Washington
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