Album Notes

The Mourning Sickness is a fracture, a resistance: An attempt to undermine -- through exposure and diversion -- the very ways in which thinking is conducted. Mourning is a process of society. It is work we must all do. It is through the work of mourning that we are able to incorporate our past and integrate its content with the work of the political. If we fail in this work, we are left merely with ghosts, (or worse, specters).

If we fail at this work, we are rendered hopeless and impotent. Modern society is infected with a sickness. This sickness produces symptoms which demand that the work of mourning remain incomplete. This sickness has been brought on by the trauma and alienation of the Ideological State Apparatus (as manifest in the churches, schools, family, legal courts, the political system, trade unions, the press, and culture) and its associated Repressive State Apparatus (the tools of violence in the hands of the State).

This sickness makes us all feel like (and act like) the docile victims of some tragedy that we are. This sickness obfuscates and destroys the material connections between people and replaces them with blind allegiance to an ideology or to a leader. The Mourning Sickness operates from the assumption (probably and perhaps necessarily a false assumption) that this sickness can be fought, and that the cure lies (in part) in challenging assumptions (including this one) and exposing the break between ideology and (ultimately unknowable) reality.

Guitarist Matthew Maher conceived The Mourning Sickness in the early 1980s. The band slowly gestated over the years and, with the addition of bassist Jeff Dunn, and drummer Joe Wilkinson, the trio has given birth to a delicate dynamo with a penchant for odd rhythms, melodic excursions, and politicized lyricism; mixing and mangling the styles of Blues, Pop, Ska, and Punk.

The Mourning Sickness stretches across the horizons of rock music. Never content to simply imitate the formulas heard on the radio, its members strive to produce truly progressive music. The song structures vary from simple blues to complex compositions and the lyrics explore the everyday aspects of human existence, such as hatred, death, and politics.