1000mods Retrospective Pt. 2: Repeated Exposure To… & Youth of Dissent
Posted in audiObelisk, Features on June 28th, 2023 by JJ Koczan
Following on from last week’s reissue of their first two albums and the first installment of this retrospective, 1000mods this Friday will re-present 2016’s Repeated Exposure To… and 2020’s Youth of Dissent, specifically for US distribution through Heavy Psych Sounds. In between the one batch of reissues and another, the Chiliomodi-based generational forerunners of Greek heavy rock also announced a full round of American tour dates with their prior-confirmed appearance at Desertfest NYC as its centerpiece. It’s been, as the saying goes, quite a week.
The September trip will not be the first time 1000mods have come to the US. They visited in Feb. 2018, playing shows coast-to-coast and making stops in Mexico and Canada. The following Spring, they’d make their first voyage to Australia, and if the story of this era of the band is one of their reach expanding beyond Europe — which they covered first in this cycle as one would expect; Fall 2016 and again in early 2017 — that came very much with a mirroring expansion in scope with Repeated Exposure To…, which was released Sept. 26, 2016.
1000mods were beginning to show the band they would become, in sound and presence. Their first record, 2011’s Super Van Vacation (discussed here; review here), had portrayed them as a bunch of upstart groovers with an affection for Kyuss, perfect (yes, perfect) pacing and an ability to convey largesse in their songs through more than just tone. Vultures (review here) had followed in 2014 and charted the course for this growth. Already by then, 1000mods were a working band, touring vigorously, making videos, engaging in the kind of social networking that, at the time, was much newer and not always done. They’d even gone so far as to wrap the Vultures touring cycle with a video for “Claws” filmed at various shows. Everything they had went into pushing themselves forward.
These records are the manifestations of that. Let’s go:
Repeated Exposure To… (2016)
Maybe a case of a band having their collective cake while also eating it? The full title as it appears on the cover: Repeated Exposure to High Sound Levels (More Than 80 Decibels) May Cause Permanent Impairing of Hearing. This warning was well issued as 1000mods returned to engineer George Leodis to co-produce their third album, drawing together aspects of the first two into a cohesive and obviously maturing 51-minute outing. Seven songs, massive hooks. The sound of 1000mods growing could be heard in the finer details — the right-channel guitar mutes after and before the Monster Magnet garage jangle of “A.W.,” or even the way the siren call of feedback at the start of opener “Above179” howls into a fade as the first rolling nod kicks in loud — as well as in the overarching atmosphere of the recording. As much as Vultures had attempted to capture their live sound, Repeated Exposure To… answered back by doing the same, but in a bigger venue.
If Vultures was the club show, the tracks on Repeated Exposure To… like the energetic shover “Loose,” the short and explosive “Electric Carve,” which follows, and the later build into the sing-along-with-us chorus of “On a Stone” seemed to emanate from a festival stage. From the gang-shout hook of “Above179” and the sweep and chug and precision of its finish onward, 1000mods made it clear they were reaching out to a broader audience. It wasn’t about changing their core style — they were still very much a heavy rock and roll band, and the fuzz of “Loose” reinforced the notion well — but as their take came into its own after two previous LPs and more shows than some do in a band’s lifetime, the sense of professionalization was audible in it. Repeated Exposure To… was higher stakes.
The band played back and forth between shorter and longer cuts on side A and dug in shortest-to-longest in side B, with the closing pair of “Groundhog Day” (7:18) and “Into the Spell” (7:50) contrasting the earlier trades between the eight-plus-minute “Loose” and “Above179” before it or the three-minute “Electric Carve” ahead of rhythmic first-half capper “The Son,” which its layered highlight soloing, uptempo-but-not-too-uptempo swing and, absolutely, another ultra-engaging chorus. That’s the heart of the whole record. It feels written with the live audience in mind, all the way through to the build happening in “Into the Spell,” with its early meandering and guitar creep under the watery verse, turning to massive stoner nod and more urgent thrust as it moves to the big finish of its final third, wrapping the album as much as itself with a long fade.
This was the sound of 1000mods going all-in. They stepped up to the challenge of being a pro-shop act and wrote an accordingly pro-shop bunch of songs to mark the occasion. Still touring constantly — and in new territories, as noted above — 1000mods began to reap the fruits of their significant labors and became one of Europe’s most crucial heavy rock bands. It wouldn’t have worked if these songs weren’t there to carry them.
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Youth of Dissent (2020)
The story of Youth of Dissent — album number four and the latest 1000mods full-length — should have been that the band traveled to Seattle, Washington, to record and mix with producer Matt Bayles (Mastodon, Sandrider, Isis, etc.), outdoing their own professionalism, directly waving at the American market, and offering an even tighter collection comprised of 11 songs that, in cuts like “Warped” and “Blister” leaned into a grunge influence, while in “Dear Herculine,” “Less is More” (some grunge in there too, for sure) and the interlude “21st Space Century,” the band were also atmospheric in a way they’d never yet been and their doing most melodically complex work on record. If you missed the word ‘should’ in that far-too-long sentence, it’s there because Youth of Dissent came out on April 24, 2020.
Greece’s first case of covid-19 was discovered that fateful February, and by the time Youth of Dissent was released, the entire country had been locked down for a month, and after another few weeks of in-place sheltering would gradually begin to reopen later in a terrifying, traumatic Spring when live music and so much else evaporated. Youth of Dissent was defined in part by the resistance mindset inherent in its title and album cover, and while tracks like “So Many Days,” “Blister,” “Less is More” and the concluding “Mirrors” were resonant in speaking to the experience of depression and “Young” and “Dissent” — split between sides C and D of the 55-minute 2LP — seemed to use the platform of 1000mods‘ audience-building to speak directly to that audience and encourage them to stand up, be involved in making their world, to dissent from the various systems holding them back, the moment in which the album arrived completely undercut that statement.
Certainly the covid pandemic did not just happen to 1000mods. It happened to everybody’s everything and the heavy underground is only a teeny-tiny sliver of a microculture. Acknowledged. But to see an act who’d put in by-then eight years of road work while also building a catalog of landmarks, earning Greece a respect it maybe didn’t have before them as a hotbed of heavy in Europe, changing the geopolitics of the underground, and begun to expand their reach even beyond that have that momentum obliterated by circumstances genuinely out of their control was painful. Covid happened to every band, but not every band was 1000mods in late 2019/early 2020 making and releasing their fourth record. Of course the European tour that was to start in May 2020 didn’t happen, and it wouldn’t be until Spring 2022 that they could hit the road in earnest to support it.
Which they did and are continuing to do. Removed from the moment of its release, at three years’ distance, Youth of Dissent answers the greater reach of the record before it with even more refined and cognizant approach, and a bevvy of new ideas and directions taken. Mature as songwriters, 1000mods proved able to conjure epics regardless of a track’s runtime, communicating ideas in new ways that signaled ongoing development and a refusal to stagnate, greeting an unknowable future with hope and progressivism even as it offered some of the band’s darkest lyrical themes.
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As they’ve gotten back to live performance, that the material on Youth of Dissent has held up to the years-long split between its arrival should convey its urgency. This Fall, 1000mods return to the States all the more as a veteran act. That they’ll have these reissues along with them lends this tour — especially as a Winter 2023 Australia/New Zealand tour was canceled — an edge of celebrating the entire catalog as well as giving Youth of Dissent its overdue due, but 1000mods have only looked in one direction over the 15-plus years of their tenure, and whatever else one might expect from them, expect them to keep their eye on the future.
Thanks for reading. Again, if you missed the first part of this retrospective, it’s right here.
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