Side A
Or Does It Explode?
She Who Struggles
Pilar Of Cloud, Pilar Of Fire

Side B
Kabuki Snuff Theater
Victory Will Defeat You

Madison, Wisconsin's Tyranny Is Tyranny have been moving away from the stormy, metal-edged post-rock of their 2013 debut "Let It Come From Whom May." The songs on the new album move at once toward more sparse post-punk influences and toward more open-ended,  harmonically daring territory. While familiar elements like dynamically deliberate guitars and excoriating vocals are still present,several songs feature mournful trumpet and orchestral slow-burns -- this material has something a lot more spacious and unsettling built into it.

RIYL: Fall Of Efrafa, Neurosis, Amphetamine Reptile Records, or Chomsky.

The record's title comes from the subtitle of activist/journalist Naomi Klein's 2007 book, "The Shock Doctrine." Her ideas and our outrage and despair about globalism and neo-liberalism figure prominently in the themes of the record. Tyranny Is Tyranny is the title of the fourth chapter of Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States."

"And now, let us pause to sing the praises of epic, loud music. Or epically loud music. Personally, I prefer both. Tyranny Is Tyranny plays long songs (four of the five pieces here clock in at more than seven minutes) and from the first note the band's ambition shines through. Tyranny Is Tyranny sits squarely in the middle of prog-touched sludge punk, which isn't as far from the prog-ish sludge blues of the Paul Dianno-era Maiden as you might think. These boys have a more orchestral feel to their arrangements, even as the sound is hacked away to crudeness as often as not. This is the sound of collapse; structures rise and fall, but entropy rules. If this is the way the world ends, pour me a beer or two and pull up a chair. The show is awesome." - Aiding & Abetting

RELEASED BY PHRATRY RECORDS