On As Cities Burn’s ‘Come Now, Sleep’ and God.
I’ve talked many times on this account (and in the Medium to which most of my larger thoughts about music are connected) about how I’m a full album person. Typically I speak about bands in terms of how their entire release stands and it’s harder for me to separate the individual elements of those albums than it is to speak about them in grander strokes. That being said, I think sometimes I can get my head up my ass about it a little bit in terms of not allowing myself the complete enjoyment of a portion of a record, even if only to spite myself because one fraction of a record “doesn’t hold up”.
Enter the first half of As Cities Burn’s second album, Come Now, Sleep.
I jumped back into this record on a whim a few weeks ago, specifically remembering the powerful transition from the records solemn opening track to its tom hit that kicks off track 2’s wave of wild signature guitar styles. It brought back a lot of memories surrounding my time with the album and the feeling of surprise I felt upon release with the direction that the album went in. Son, I Loved You At Your Darkest was openly aggressive, openly a Christian Hardcore Album. It did display its own elements of blues inspired guitar progressions and a very deeply textured sense of layers and audio post-production. What some might call World Building in a video game or fiction sense. But overall with LP1, the band was going for madness, for bedlam. In LP2, there’s a more delicate approach. At first blush, it comes across as a bit more forlorn, more melancholy. But I think after listening to it a bunch, the more accurate sense of the word I get is defeated.
My first few impressions of this record were that it was a “good” follow-up, but ultimately left me feeling like I wanted a little bit more. Shortly after its release, I went to a show and met up with a few friends who I knew were also massive ACB fans. And when we got to talking about the second album, I was hit with the seeds of an idea that grew far beyond the scope of that conversation and even beyond the scope of this album in particular. They said with such sincere certainty it jarred me:
“This is an album about Cody questioning his faith.”
I don’t think I’d ever really understood the literal sense of what Christian Hardcore meant. At that time, I don’t think I’d ever really considered the lyrics from the bands I enjoyed having any particular focal point, any manifestation in the real world. Lyrics to me were (and in many ways, still are) simply a shaping of jigsaw puzzle pieces which the voice forms to complete rhythms within a song. Considering I was mostly still mentally and emotionally A Kid through much of that time, I still had an understanding that many people in the bands I listened to were mostly my age or younger. That’s not to say they weren’t capable of writing lyrics that would mean something, but mostly, I imagined them being about dread ennui and the formless and endless hopes that came with Youth, along with the longings for Love from any number of people that came and went in their lives’ temporal instances.
To newly translate this into something so abstract and benign to me was jarring, but to understand how important it could be to someone else to write a record about God was profound to me. I took the information and it shaded the album with a new timbre. Questioning faith? Isn’t that kind of like [spoiler alert] finding out Santa isn’t real? Don’t you just move on with a more clear vision from here on out?
I was raised Roman Catholic, went to Sunday school, still talked to many kids who went to the same Sunday school I did, went to the same Sunday morning masses that I did. We never ‘celebrated’ God. We never worshiped like that. I think in some ways, it felt like ‘we did our time’ and moved on. I never knew someone who Loved God like that. At that time in my life, I’d never known someone who observed or revered Jesus like that. Never knew someone who basked in the beauty of His Love. All of the things that I see now as an adult as ways in which people Believe, Worship, Observe have beautiful and complicated tones. Back then, it all felt like a failed mystique. God was already dead, Man. What do you mean Questioning Your Faith? And you wrote a whole album about it?
Sometime in the last eight years or so, I spoke to a friend who was raised Baptist (I think?) and in our talks about the road towards and away from Faith, I talked about how I was raised Roman Catholic and his reaction was one of Knowing. “Aw man,” I remember him saying with a grimace. “You didn’t get any of the good stuff.” I had always been meant to quantify my level of Goodness in relation to my volume of sacrifice. What level of personal suffering has to happen for salvation to finally come?
My hubris was boundless then.
My disrespect often dwarfed my egomania.
It’s been over a decade, but I still think about who I was in that phase of my life and hide my face. It’s that same thought process that had me writing scathing and negative reviews on a music blog trying to get laughs off of people’s art. Hiding behind a keyboard and criticizing people’s vulnerability and effort while I listened to their record between matches of video game hockey and Mario Party. While I created nothing I shouted judgments. That whole period of my life, the weird pupa stage between adolescence and The Rest of It is such an eye-opening time in retrospect, a penciled line on the doorframe that I see and don’t want to go back beyond.
The Shape of God
I think a lot about the phrase “made in His image.” The blind hubris of an entire race (probably started by a small village, a tribe, a band of several families) to think that an omniscient, omnipotent power, a creator of Any and All would choose to create something in its own form is blinding in its arrogance, its ignorance. I think about an unseeable power, a force that has control over planets, over plains of empty gravity, an existence larger than any conceivable place, any conceivable Being manifested in the shape of A Grown Human Male larger and able to witness all of its creation in one sweeping gaze. The notion is perverse.
Conversely, I think about the orbits, photosynthesis, physics and its enigmas, and all of it being ignited, put into motion, conceived of and initiated by A Grown Human Male who is the shape of an average individual, living at 180 pounds, in the range of about 6 feet tall and controlling all of which exists from boundary to border to barrier (and beyond) by simple use of its mind. Does He shave? Does He consume?
Even the Buddha’s form decayed.
Something in this small and brazen phrase really sends the concept of Belief and Faith in God into a spiral for me. Even as a kid, it felt absurd to me (though the term ‘absurd’ wasn’t in my vocabulary; at the time, I probably just thought it was dumb, impossible). And as I’ve grown older, the concept has trailed off into further realms of ungraspable reality to the point where even if this is the only point of contention I had, it’s almost strong enough to keep my mind and heart at arm’s length.
I think, then: what does God look like?
What shape must They take? What gender must They embody? Are They beyond us?
Would we answer the prayers of our mitochondria?
Doubt sets in easily for me, as I’ve only worshiped outside of my volition. The questions I’ve offered up to a speculative Lord tend to circumnavigate my personal experience and eventually solve out as quantitative answers by meditation, by thought, by intuition. Over violent centuries, over boundless wars and blood that we (as a species created in His image) have spilled, are we attributing the answers that eventually separate and float to the top to God? Are we granting Him the credit of a divine centrifuge?
How long do we wait before we give ourselves credit for doing the ethereal work as we separate dream from will?
What Glory do we allow ourselves, what Grace do we leave on the doorsteps of a creature we only know the shape of by every glance in a mirror?
In God via the Roman Catholic methods in which I was taught, what more is He than a judge, an executioner? What more than a Command State utilizing punitive means to shepherd a herd? Where, then, is there room for His Love when all spiritual square footage is populated by our own cautions?
Cody Bonnette and Come Now, Sleep
Come Now Sleep was a pivotal record in the career of As Cities Burn. TJ Bonnette, the primary singer left the band and left the duties to brother Cody. The younger sibling had singing and screaming parts on Son, I Loved You At Your Darkest but his style was distinctly different. The screams were pulled from a more desperate place, clearly not part of his stronger skillsets. On a couple of the songs on their first record, he can be heard doing a lot more of the singing parts that became part of their sound once TJ had left. The shaky and emotive vocals took the place of the raw and more “hardcore” sound of his older brother. This record was going to have to “prove” that he could handle front man duties and that he could take the band forward.
In the opening track, things feel immediately different. Ambient traces of guitars float gently across calm and open waters while astral pinpricks of light rain down along the soundscape. Things feel broad and empty and desolate. Bonnette’s vocals drift deftly across the plain in layers, nearly whispered and placed down in light flakes, tracing the outline of clouds, of questions, of uncertainty.
Thematically, we can sense a shift. The first few words of the initial verses break with faith without hesitation.
We are truly alone
’Cause God ain’t up in the sky
Holding together our bones
We can hear the questions, the pleading, the desperate need to fill a void which was filled with His Love, His Light. And all that’s filled in its place is a stark reality where he has found no shred of an afterlife, no guiding Father, no sacred lamb.
Even the cover of the record, a vast and dark emptiness likely in some spiritual limbo, with presumably the bodies of people left behind, waiting to be buried, entombed, offered… whatever… I believe it speaks to the unanswered assumptions that we have about What Comes Next and how he’s perceived exactly what he’s been waiting for.
Remember we used to speak
Now I’m starting to think
That your voice was really my own
Bouncing off the ceiling back to me
There’s a power in the realization that he’s having. God as he exists without us, as Some Tertiary Otherness is in fact not the one answering his prayers. He is not the one providing vision, providing sense, providing rationality. As Bonnette’s words leave his heart, pass his lips, grace the tips of his fingers folded and met in whispered adoration, they’re not being heard or digested or considered. They’re being affirmed by whichever and whatever exists in The Self. The Light, the “God Internal”, whatever deus ex machina converts the convictions and the interrogations within its internal coils, it’s his very own voice. The shadow on the cave wall. There is no God with His ear to the clouds, hungrily and gracefully absorbing one of his flock and providing providence. It’s within Cody. It’s always been within him. The strength that he was finding Out There was revealing itself to be coming from In Here. The lack of volume, the lack of intensity, the lack of verve almost reveals itself as if he has reached the bottom of his heartbreak, truly lost as he has pulled back the curtain to find no speaker at the podium, no voice at the microphone. It has been absent from the start.
God, could it be that all we see is it?
Is this it?
Thinking on Cody’s perspective here, I wonder about his sense of perpetuity. He was speaking with no one for years. Not only about this life, but as the great promise and the great eternal payoff: what lies beyond this? His conclusion of there being a great nothing after this opens an avenue to a vast disbelief. In the place of affirmation, all beauty drains from the panorama. This simply cannot be what he’s been looking for. He has never lived for now, but has instead lived for time in some Tomorrow Kingdom.
Oh, my heaven, why do you have doors to close?
And in his doubt, in some courageous moment, he wonders aloud, reflecting his interrogations back down to him, why have we given A Crown to He who would instead judge those who He created in His image, a people who he was meant to shower with the same Love that he meant to have echoed back to him. How can One with such adoration for his flock have the same capacity within Him to turn away The Wicked, those who need his Love and Light and Grace the most? We build fences to keep people out. We erect gates to hand select who passes and who doesn’t. We create doors for security.
If not dead,
God must be asleep.
This opening track acts as a thesis, the great examination of just how gone his God is. But if there is no God, what is left in that void confessional? We see him standing at the axis of two scales, toes hanging over the agnostic ridge on the cusp of some great awakening or some great reckoning.
The vault from ‘Contact’’s winding and fluid stage of Bonnett’s denial slams halo first with the opening snare pop of Empire’s venomous anger. This sound is actually the origin of each of the thoughts put forth in this essay. I was blown away by the impact of what it must be to completely question a life’s dedication in one work of art. It feels like the transition from Contact to Empire sounds the door slamming shut on one phase of his life and into the next. The spittle from between the teeth seem to foam at the corners of his mouth, the blood from his fingertips sounds like it scrapes along the gritty ribs of his guitar strings. The song has a sarcastic tone about it, coming across nearly as a mocking embrace of this new second reality where he has now become nascently aware of his own accountability to how things live before him, how things end around him, how time now feels more a chain than a link.
In this song, he speaks openly of the fangs he bared that sat behind his cupped hands. How he had no use for God’s sacrifice. With avarice, he speaks of his place in his brotherhood, and he confesses:
Then your love, it came to me
Stood next to mine
And I saw that I was poor
It showed me I was poor
It feels like he speaks about how he found humility in the Light of God, but only as he saw that he was small against His greater presence. In dizzying spins, towards the end, like a cast away, he repeats that he doesn’t know how he was made. Was he shaped in the Image of The Lord? Is he just the result of smashed atoms in some miracle of the vast vacuum of The Disembodied Universe? In a final irony, before we shred into The Hoard he utters:
I was a wicked one
And in ‘The Hoard’, he talks about those same Believers who pray for those aforementioned Doors to remain closed to all of those that haven’t earned their way through.
They’re steady breathers
Who won’t lift a finger for the gasping weaker
You just hoard your hollow completion
Like it’s something wearing thin
Like it’s gonna get you in
When heaven comes
This song bends and groans in a lot of different directions musically. It almost sounds like a leaning tower soldered together from a rosary’s worth of different ideas, each passed from hand to finger and lifted with the same reverence. There is a heart to the song for sure. Its chorus lifts its head from the water time and again, examining and dissecting the light and state of Grace.
This song casts an accusatory spotlight on those who use their personal devotion, their faith as a self-ingratiating pedestal, a permission to look down at those who don’t hold the same values, don’t exhibit the same tributes of faith.
Bonnett talks about those who’ve dressed themselves in the illumination of some overwhelming, some quantifiable, some perishable grace which they continue to scrape their knees against. Something that they whisper amongst themselves about, something that gives them an upper caste that they believe in which allows them to throw others in some imposing shadow.
Grace make your way to the well
But it’s in vain
’Cause they don’t need it
I do think, though, that there’s a marvelous revelation in this song. A lyric which touches upon the beauty of Praise, the beauty of Love but that which lies within ourselves. He talks about the promise of the most beautiful of tomorrows, an end which opens its arms and accepts all the faults, forgives all of the withering and wicked blights within us. A glow which when we allow to touch us grants us a dismissal from Time’s Endless Wheel.
Cause when heaven comes
I swear it comes in love
In this song’s conclusion, he casts away the burden of The Lord, he casts away the burden of Belief and of his Endless Debt.
Now i let go of your hand somewhere between
Love and what it demands of me
There’s a freedom about the next song, ‘This Is It, This Is It.’
It’s written from the perspective of sailors, pirates possibly, heathens definitely. There seems to be a revelry about it, a strong belief in the temporal nature of their lives in this, which seems to be acting as their final voyage, stranded at sea with no one out there to come for them. But in this sense of being adrift and without the saviors coming for them, their seems to be a life-affirming cry about them from the captain. Nothing that these men do, not a thing that they can accomplish will ever free them from their burden of disbelief.
We try to live forgiven but they won’t let us forget.
There is a sort of helplessness to their cry, a knowledge and an acceptance of their death. There’s something of a desperation in their acknowledgement of their mortality.
Son,
this is it, this is it.
Cody knows that yes, this is it.
All we see is it.
Forget about being honest,
Forget about being passionate.
Wear that smile like you feel it
even when you don’t.
It almost feels like within the certainty of death, in the certainty of this limited time, this is the most alive he’s ever felt. Celebrate your sins, as they’re not always a wickedness or an evil. Celebrate the life that you’ve had and the time you are given, adrift or not. Nothing is coming for you, no one is coming to drag you from your fate.
It almost could not be said more directly, that those who’ve Hoarded, those who have stolen all the grace from the well have turned from the Light of God and instead of finding these men to help bring them into salvation, they instead choose to persecute them with judgment and condemnation.
I think they forgot about Jesus
seeking us out.
Cody Bonnette wants no more part in this repression, this cycle of chasing down the Love of a God who he has instead found within himself. He has affirmed that the answers he’s sought are coming from his own understandings, his own contemplations, his own meditations. He’s found them through the clarity of his own light, that which glows without a judgment of others, without a quantification of grace. He has found Heaven within Love. And he knows that no matter the sin, no matter the discretion, those that will torment him for those misgivings will come for him no matter his willingness of retribution, no matter his way of living. No one is coming for him. He has an entire life to live. And he has found the Great Peace that we all seek.
In a slow waking shimmer, ‘Clouds’ fades in with resonating and fragmented guitar ambience. Like coming into light after being in darkness, many many voices fade and jam and bottle neck into our ears as people of indeterminate and varied age, background and denomination speak about Who do you think God is and what do you think God is? We hear certainty and incertainty, we hear parable, we hear rambling streams of consciousness. We hear understanding and we hear people coming to terms with their belief as the sentences string together. All of these sentences string together like a quilt, then like a shuffled deck of cards. I’ve found that no matter how close I get to the audio, I can’t make out all of it. The answers are endless, the responses are infinite. God is an infinite number of anythings and god is a fathomless experience of everything.
Is your God really God?
Is my God really God?
I think our God isn’t God.
If it fits inside our head.
In arguably the record’s largest and most cleanly designed structure, ‘Clouds’ drives forward with a polished and immaculate certainty. While not an exhibition of faith, I think we find that there’s an admission here that God as he once perceived it does not exist, cannot exist. In the world we live in filled with so much love that we can experience, heavens that we can digest and revisit and speak with, despite losing the entity of this towering omnipotence, he has also gained the enlightenment of someone who has felt a void, has succumb to a numbing, but then allowed themselves to accept the feeling back into their extremities. Faith and Love and Belief takes the shape of all that surrounds us. The paradigm is shattered. All the voices, whether we can make out what they’re saying or not, are correct. We’ve all found god. Even and especially when it doesn’t fit inside our head.
And in this fifth song, halfway through the album, I almost feel like there’s a closing of a book. Coming back to my initial thoughts about ‘full albums’, this is where the album began to fade into the background for me. Even before these songs were internal dialogs about wrestling with the concept of a God, and where all of my love and prayer went as I realized there was nothing beyond my ceiling, beyond the clouds, beyond The Here, these were just songs. And these first five songs all had a power about them. These songs were powerful and I found myself screaming alongside them. As if it were Side A of a record, I continued to place the needle back on the opening track and play these songs again and again.
And in my more recent revelations about the album, I think it’s because these songs feel like they bouquet together as an EP. The songs that come after them need a different angle to be considered. I think the opening half of this record shines with an intensity and a passion that feels like it rivals all other reckonings up to the songwriter’s life to this point. And while on their debut record, screams and roars were prevalent, it feels like when they arrive on this effort, the aggressive vocals mean more? It feels dragged out from some raw scraped out hollow within him.
Songs that come after this “EP” half of the record don’t fill me with the same profound feelings that I have through the first record. And with my new ears, I’ve tried to examine these songs and find the same interrogations that I found within those that preceded it. ‘New Sun’ is a rad song that seems to feel a little wobbly kneed, a little bleary and raw like some new fawn.
I need her now that you’re breaking up
Soon she’ll become my new sun
Soon she’ll become
She’s stealing her light from the old one
This feels like he can finally dedicate his complete self to his lover now that there is no reserve kept siloed for a God he had carved a place out for. He speaks about the communication with the above like fading radio contact. And we start to remove ourselves from the center. ‘Tides’ has one of the greatest ‘hooks’ and choruses of the record, a howling that feels almost shamanic and tempted by lunacy.
‘Timothy’ speaks about the passing of a close friend of the band, a wandering and weary song that sees the band take the walls away and cry out in catharsis, seeking solace from the pain of a lost friend.
Every element of this is speculation. I’ve not run this by the band or found any studio journals or looked into any album analysis (except for this article here, an excellent experience piece on how this album walked with him through some profound and difficult parts of his life). I could be running my fingers along this apocrypha and pulling my own personal deitic politics and overlaying them through a foul laminate.
I will say that the genesis of this entire analysis began because I began what was meant to be a little 2 minute Reel on how powerful that snare pop is at the beginning of ‘Empire’ and how it must have been so cathartic to turn your doubt in God into a singular sound. It built from There to… Here. As lyric after lyric began to speak to me in deeper depth, my notes began to become paragraphs. Words started to sparkle with a more pragmatic and personal esotericism and over more and more listens, the glyphs began to find a post-Rosetta clarity to me. Almost like a voice from Above, but instead from Within.
My own personal spiritual journey(s) have always led inward, torch aloft, into the labyrinth of Self. Often the grandest emotions and the most vast revelations have come as I’ve razed the walls of that maze and ventured toward the ever-elusive center. It brings me an unquantifiable happiness when I get to see the light in someone else’s eyes when they have found that same Shapeless Light. I seek out these stories of individuals’ personal enlightenment and glory, and how they find god or “god” or God. The touchstone happiness most often comes when dividing lines are eradicated and they no longer must choose to partition their joy from rigor.
I watched this bloom in the heart and the eyes of an old friend just recently, and I know that she saw It. Whatever It is, I know that It always lived within her, the seed within a fertile soil waiting for sun, for nourishment. She didn’t find this through prayer, through suffering, through habit or devotion. She found this in commune with her life, with the world around her, with the people she surrounded herself with. She saw the Light.
This EP within Come Now Sleep as a whole feels like the culmination of a similar journey. To hear Cody speak about the Heaven without doors, the one that comes in love, enriches my heart and my affirmation that all the greatest things in the life we experience will come from within us. Within you.
I hope you find it, man.
Whatever you choose to call it, whether divinity or infinity, an entity or Self, I know it’s there for you.
