Blessed Rage for Order
New album by local rock experimentalists Thornton explores the nexus between faith and excess
by Paul V. Griffith
Like the character von Ashenbach in Thomas Mann's novella Death in Venice, Kevin Thornton is between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, Thornton—who heads the Nashville experimental rock band that bears his name—is the product of a Southern Baptist upbringing, and that tradition's emphasis on discipline, regularity and form show up in his music. On the other, Thornton's work indicates a predilection for the sensual and the chaotic, an emotional intensity that runs contrary to his conservative beginnings. As Ashenbach—a burned-out writer who is obsessed with a gorgeous young boy—learns, the urge for form and the urge for chaos are not unrelated: in the quest for formal beauty, the best-intentioned artists are led toward what Mann calls "frightening emotional excesses."
Thornton's self-released debut CD, Had a Sword, lives in this space between order and chaos. Musically, its songs rise and fall from rock-like intensity to muted meanderings. The record's themes, some of which derive from the Baptist Hymnal, build with assurance only to end in muddled obscurity. It's as if Thornton were throwing himself into the pit only to claw his way out, open his hymnal to "Lead Us, O Father" and lead us on another slow descent.
There's no lesson to be learned from Thornton's fallings. (Since, as Mann writes, all are "heading direct for the pit," artists have no business teaching anyway.) He has nothing to say about religion per se, its evils or benefits, and offers no reconciliation between his strict church upbringing and his adult life. His songs allude to dependent love, homosexuality, masochism and God (sometimes all at the same time), but Thornton seems to take little stock in any of it. He remains passive, willing to accept whatever a lover, or God, has in store for him.
Take, for example, "My Teacher," which has a sparse, pentatonic lilt reminiscent of Sunday school classics like "I Love to Tell the Story." "In a minute, the powers come down / With the sound of a black magic father," he begins as a low-fi drum loop begins to click away in the background. "He makes the whips of discipline / But still a friend / He'll get you off he'll get you further / My teacher come back again / Can't reach it or can't find the end / There's never another friend / Can't find a better man."
Since Thornton's sexual orientation long ago ruled out his inclusion in Southern Baptist circles, he has suffered not for the faith but because of it; at various times, he seems both drawn to and repulsed by the Christian symbolism that informs his work. His lyrics show that, like many of us, his desires are tied to his understanding of God, and Had a Sword draws its strength from the tension between religious imagery and its often sexual subject matter.
The pursuit of form and beauty, Mann tells us, is a journey that leads both to death (literally, in Ashenbach's case) and to "an immensity of rich expectation." Christianity may be dead for Thornton, but his childhood familiarity with Southern Baptist worship, its hymnody and preaching, gives form to Had a Sword. With that as his frame of reference, he can explore the more chaotic aspects of his adult life like sexuality, the nature of attachment and God.
