Description
Tertium datur. Between polarities and dualisms lies a third element, born from their deactivation and indeterminacy. Coincidentia oppositorum. Opposites do not separate but instead blur and coincide.This transgression of structures and logic is what Human Needs accomplish with their debut album, Concrete//Generic.
From the title itself, the particular, the material, the concrete, and the generic, the abstract, the universal, no longer exclude each other but enter new and original constellations. The slash between terms separates and unites, deactivates. What is singular matter is already universal form. The idea is not separation but paradigm, what is shown alongside, a constellation of singularities. Anarcho-punk meets post-punk, which in turn encounters raw punk. But these three traditions of punk articulation do not blend and dilute one another into a clumsy mixture. Instead, by retaining their distinctive characteristics, they constellate alongside each other, and in this tension-filled juxtaposition, they interrupt the flow of individual genres to create something new.
The classic anarcho-punk of The Mob, Zounds, and Lack of Knowledge aligns perfectly with the primal post-punk of early Theatre of Hate and Southern Death Cult, which, in turn, engage in tension and modernize with echoes of Institute and Diät, without flattening onto any of these influences. Punk fury and speed mix with slow, tribal moments, where the declamatory voice merges with the background through reverb, becoming an instrument and returning as a lament or hymn, primordial moments of human vocal articulation.
If post-punk, more than a music genre, has been a device for overcoming and indetermining forms, for
turning boundaries into thresholds, for blurring perimeters, Concrete//Generic is a work that operates precisely in this direction (“On which side you choose to be? / Stay out or in / And when you lose your reason / You know that hating is free”). Beginning with the ambient recording of the intro, where barking dogs and noise merge, it then goes on to question how the animal sound articulates itself in the crying of children and the human voice (“And the dogs bark / And cry the kids”), exploring the boundary between beast and human — a central issue also reflected visually, from the cover to the inserts. And, probably, even this separation and opposition collapses and loses its meaning when one manages to position oneself, as Concrete//Generic does, in the space that opens up between polarities. And perhaps the truly and specific human need is exactly the animal no longer repressed, but a simple dancing force within our humanity.
– Emanuele Edilio Pelilli
