Kal Marks: My Name Is Hell

The underlying musical and philosophical idea of Kal Mark’s latest full-length My Name Is Hell is trotted out upfront like the proud thesis of an undergraduate Lit paper. It runs something like the Roman playwright Terence’s famous pronouncement: nothing human is alien to me. In other words, forget your pretensions because you’re wallowing in the muck with the rest of us. 

The motto is liberating in its counterintuitive embrace of mediocrity and facelessness. In the overheated landscape of Late Capitalism, we’re all atomized individuals fired up to compete, even as we not-so-secretly find ways to quiet quit. Why not own it? But Kal Marks can’t quite let go and fall into comfortable lockstep with the herd. The opening lyrics of the opening track “My Life Is A Freak Show” signals the growing sense of alienation:

“We’re all animals // We’re all feeding from the same trough.

“We all live in the same house // cut from the same cloth.”

But not the protagonist of the song (let’s call him Hell, for obvious reasons). He has a monstrous side. His voice transforms into something unnatural, like a mild-mannered Bruce Banner morphing into the Hulk, as Dylan Teggart’s drums rip a fissure in the earth’s crust and pulls out ten thousand screaming demons for the listener’s delectation. In a bloody roar:

“My life is a freak show // Got no place to go.”

Whatever pleasures are offered by the anonymity of the crowd are inaccessible to Hell. The effort to assimilate, though, is without end. Whether it’s through the awkward sense of shared place in “Shit Town” or through the banal, Dad-joked commiseration of “Everybody Hertz,” Hell laments his inability to build a satisfactory bridge to the rest of humanity. In lieu of that connection, the idea of connection is raised to such a level that a humdrum event like a new neighbor becomes a kind of catharsis in “New Neighbor.” A new face out the window has been elevated into a near religious experience.

The enduring secret of the lonely-hearted is that they enjoy their solitude. Ignore all the performative protestations. Our protagonist Hell doesn’t bother to introduce himself – the first step in connecting with others – until the title track “My Name Is Hell,” past the halfway point of the album. Over a deep, bouncy bass, Carl Shane names the protagonist in a punk-croon as the song descends into a rumbling instrumental jam. It’s as if the naming ceremony was supposed to work its own magic as a kind of incantation, and Hell was just waiting and watching for the world to take notice.

The hellacious track “Ovation” to follow lodges itself deep in the gratification-seeking layers of Hell’s primitive psychology. He wants to be applauded for offering up his name as a sacrifice to be shucked and discarded like a corn husk so that Hell’s painful freak individuality can be effaced into the blank mass of humanity. Given the violent finish to “Ovation,” it’s not entirely clear that humanity wants him.

How seriously are we to take the suffering of Hell? Is he an everyman, a window through which we can examine our own spiritual predicament? Maybe he’s just a freak and nothing more. Kal Marks gives us an out with the final two tracks to close the album, “Mr. Dictionary (A Satire)” and “Bored Again.” The first provides an alternate lens through which to read the story told on My Name Is Hell – as a comedy, not tragedy. The second suggests why one might build such an elaborate 11-track comedy (and it’s not a very impressive reason): boredom.

Boston’s Kal Marks, based in Brooklyn/Cranston, RI

The opt-out is a little too pat for the quality of pathos Kal Marks wrings out of its instruments. It’s not boredom that pulls you out of bed each morning to lay another brick in your labor of love. The protagonist Hell proves a supremely effective hook on which to hang 11 tracks of alienation, angst, and diabolical drama. The Big Takeaway is not so much a proof or disproof of Terrence’s aphorism as it is a reveal of the existential unease produced in trying to live your life by the motto. We can make claims on humanity all we want, but it might not return the favor. And when the world is ready to accept us, we’re eager to get out of town. Or as Groucho Marx put it: “I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”

With My Name Is Hell, the band has conceived and produced some of its finest recorded material to date. The guitar-driven, No Wave-influenced four-piece shows us the heights and depths and lengths and breadths that can be carved out of the rock n roll idiom, fashioning a cosmos that is generous enough in its proportion and design to accommodate everything that belongs to the human story. Even the freak shows.

---