“Cenobite” Cover Art
If one wanted to try to draw some silver lining around the absolute clusterfuck mashup of ineptitude, corruption, injustice, and sheer stupidity that was 2020, perhaps it’s this: in a more profound and prolific way than any year in recent many, the paltry bandage that is covering the the fetid, infected wounds of our society. You’d need to have been completely willfully ignorant to not see the way so many combined issues and frustrations reached a head. Racially inequality, healthcare, income inequality – to name a few – met at a crossroads. Many people recognize that it is well overdue for sweeping structural changes to address these societal imbalances.
If you’ve been following Boston music closely for the past two years and change, then reading that intro should clue you in on what band we’re gonna be talking about today: it’s Camp Blood day, motherfuckers! The duo – who started by treading a line between industrial rock, metal, and hip-hop before grabbing that chalk and drawing their own line beyond what a simple combination of those elements could amount to – are back with “Cenobite,” their first single of 2021.
For a quick profile, Camp Blood is the tag-team duo of Shaka Dendy and Haasan Barclay. With an EP and some singles out (including “Psalm 23,” a collab with Montreal rapper and recent Polaris Music Prize winner Backxwash), the band has been building a small-but-powerful back catalog of incisive, biting sociopolitical critique meshed with intense and experimental soundscapes. Never satisfied with clean, rounded-off sound palettes, Barclay is an avid scientist in the studio, keen to produce thunderous percussion sections, anvil-heavy guitar riffs, and feedback-laden noise. Shit can get harsh, but Camp Blood’s sound is at its most triumphant when it’s also at its harshest. For the brief period when they could still perform live, their sets were raw, energetic displays. It’s not hard to imagine that their first set post-lockdown will register on the Richter.
With “Cenobite,” the duo continues to carve out their own unique space within Boston music. Opening with a tone that sounds less like an instrument than a civil defense siren, the jarring tone is met with an urgent kick drum. “I put these sounds together at a time in my life when I was feeling a sense of stagnation and looming peril,” says Haasan. “The dissonant synths and jangly guitars relate to the far away feeling I was dealing with personally.”
For Shaka Dendy, the song was an opportunity to put words to that cross section of social issues mentioned above; chiefly, the intersection of racial inequality and class. “I was having conversations with peers about Black people’s relationship to Capitalism, and the purported ‘Black Capitalist’–if we understand Black people to be the foundation of Capitalism in the modern sense, how can we be expected not to participate, even when the game is so evidently rigged against us? Whether you’re the player or the ball, there’s something to be lost; innocence in a sense.” Dendy kicks the song off following that line of thought: “What’s the cost of your skin?” before delving into some lyrical wordplay around that word “innocence.”
The title of the track itself is most likely a reference to the demonic characters from the now-iconic film Hellraiser and its ensuing franchise. You know, the guy with pins in his head (aptly nicknamed “Pinhead“). With that in mind, it might be easy to assume that Camp Blood are referring to themselves as cenobites, a demonic force here to raise some hell for the rest of us. But in that film series, it’s canon that the cenobites were once humans who transformed into extra-dimensional demons the more they pursued personal gain and gratification via sadomasochistic torture. It’s far more likely that Camp Blood are punching up the ladder, critiquing the capitalists who step over everyone else, their own people, just in the pursuit of that next dollar.
Either way, it rips.
Stream “Cenobite” below and buy to Camp Blood’s self-titled EP from 2019 on Bandcamp.