I think it’s fair to assume that you’re probably reading this because you’re passionate about music. Me too! Most of us bloggers are, so we write at length about it instead of sharing our insufferable opinions with strangers whose eyes have glazed over at parties. What are you listening to at the moment? What’s your latest obsession? I’ve recently revisited an old favourite of mine and I’m excited to talk about one of the coolest bands that you’ve never heard of.
I love a good concept album. Some of my personal favourites include Being as an Ocean’s self-titled record and the Bloom EP In Passing. But it’s even more impressive to find a concept band. There are plenty of them around (Sabaton, Austrian Death Machine, Dr. Colossus), although I’m pretty picky when it comes to themed artists. What makes Defeater stand out from the crowd is how much it feels like their own experiences, even though it’s only fictional with historical references (and they don’t dress up). In their fifteen-year career, the Massachusetts melodic hardcore quintet have released five studio albums and an EP, all following the same story. Vocalist Derek Archambault writes in the first person as members of a broken family – termed his “Glass family” in interviews – in post-WWII era New England.
The narrative follows an abusive father, an addict mother, a resentful son and his hardened younger brother on a backdrop of war and religion. Archambault’s dedication to this concept is evident in his lifelong passion for writing songs of love, hope, faith, death and despair without breaking character. Each album is rife with lyrical callbacks that expand on the world whilst developing their sound. You can picture the scene: a dilapidated railway through a coastal town with a shipyard, a church, a general store and a tavern called The Copper Coin. With violent drunks in the bars and conniving junkies in the alleys, it doesn’t sound like somewhere you would want to raise a family. This also means that I generally listen to an entire album in a single sitting. To get the full picture, it’s best to play everything that they release from start to finish to really invest in the plot. For this reason, I’ve decided not to share the links of any specific songs to check out.
If you’re not familiar with the band or their music, perhaps it would be easiest for me to explain the major plot points of each record – or at least how I interpret them. Originally intended as a standalone concept, Defeater’s 2008 debut album Travels introduces us to the family and their dysfunctional relationships. Their 2009 EP Lost Ground is another conceptual project with similar themes to the rest of their albums, although it follows a new character who is never revisited. The 2011 album Empty Days & Sleepless Nights retells the events of their first album from the perspective of the older brother. 2013’s Letters Home, their most successful album and the first that I heard, depicts the father John’s experiences in the army. My personal favourite, 2015’s Abandoned, shifts to the perspective of the priest who is mentioned throughout the band’s earlier work. Finally, the 2019 self-titled record continues the story of the father’s war history in greater detail. Now, let’s unpack all of this.
Travels opens with the unhealthy dynamic between the father, who turns to alcohol after the war, and mother, who prays for forgiveness for her heroin addiction, at the time of their youngest son’s birth. It flashes forward to the younger brother protecting his mother from his father’s drunken attack by beating him to death with a whisky bottle. Yeah, it’s heavy. He then takes to the streets where he survives as a drifter before getting a job as a farmhand in exchange for a place to stay. Years later, he hitches a ride back to his childhood home where he learns that his mother is dead. The older brother marches him at gunpoint to the railway tracks where they would dodge trains as children, only for him to escape his brother’s grip and kill him instead. He then walks to the church and confesses his sins to a priest before jumping from the bell tower. I particularly enjoy the sonic shift in “Prophet in Plain Clothes” halfway through the record and see if you can pick the Metallica riff in the six-minute closer (think Load).
Lost Ground is set in the past and told through the eyes of an African American working-class man who joins the army after his mother dies to follow in the footsteps of his father. It describes his experiences at war with Germany, surviving in the harsh conditions of the trenches for a forgotten cause. After an attack, he is shot and critically wounded before waking up in hospital to learn that his whole infantry was killed. Struggling with survivor’s guilt, he buries his friends and is awarded a medal for his service that gives him no consolation for his trauma. The veteran is then left to wander a neglectful society where nobody will offer him work because of his skin colour. As a result, he is rejected by the city and let down by his mother’s faith until he is left alone to grow old and bitter. The imagery of the lyrics really puts you in the cold and wet of war and homelessness. This is also where we get the timeless line ‘I got the blues and they still got me’.
Empty Days & Sleepless Nights shifts to the perspective of the older brother, exploring his guilt and grief of letting people down. It opens with the son burying his father and caring for his mother as she slowly dies from drug abuse. He then meets his soon-to-be wife at a bar where he later drowns his sorrows after she is killed by a vengeful bookie whom he lost a fight to. One day, he awakens to an empty house and searches the streets for his mother before finding her dead from an overdose in the local church. This leads to a retelling of the ending of Travels from the older brother’s perspective, seeing the orphaned brothers reunite for a grim finale at the train tracks. I love how “White Oak Doors” ends abruptly mid-lyric to imply the moment that the bullet hits, lingering for a further two minutes of silence to let the realisation sink in. The last four songs are acoustic with clean vocals chronicling the good old days, recalling when his younger brother was born, their brotherly love growing up, bonding with his wife and mourning her death.
Letters Home shifts back to the perspective of the father, John, years before the events of Travels. It explains that he unashamedly killed the pusher who sold drugs to, and possibly slept with, his wife and how he uses this courage at war when reading letters from her. Similar to Lost Ground, it sets the scene of WWII that he and his fellow soldiers are fighting in, lamenting his patriotic brother who proudly died at sea. He grows further apart from his wife as she struggles with addiction in his absence before being wounded in battle and close to death, ending with another six-minute closer that comes full circle. This record in particular does a great job of conveying the misery of war and the small mercies that offer comfort in desperate times. It also shows that the broken family is a result of the father’s own hardships and fractured life, repeating the cycle of young men striving to make their families – who both haunt and comfort them – proud for the wrong reasons.
Abandoned follows the perspective of the priest first mentioned in Travels, detailing the effect of years of service in the military on his religious faith. Casting his mind back to 1943, he recalls when another preacher saved him, perhaps both spiritually and literally, on the frontline which gives him hope again. He confesses his sins to be forgiven, like fighting the war and abandoning his pregnant lover who is later lost to drugs, leading him to become a drunk in similar circumstances to the original parents. After searching for atonement in church, he realises that he has always been alone and loses all respect for God and his lover. At this point, he is almost longing for war where he had a sense of purpose, much like the man in Lost Ground. It’s interesting that all of the characters share the same arc in the end. The riffs and arrangements on this album are some of the band’s best and I love how the repeated refrains like ‘Forgive me, my father, for I am a sinner’ make the songs feel cohesive.
Defeater is their latest release and probably the weakest, both thematically and sonically. It goes back to the perspective of the father, which feels a little stale by this point, although it shares an experience of being aboard a sinking ship in the Solomon Sea for a change of scenery. As well as the horror of war, it also explores post-traumatic stress and the unhealthy habits that form as coping mechanisms, like gambling and the aforementioned alcohol and drug abuse. He details how he killed the cheating cards player from the start of Letters Home, taking an eye as a trophy before disposing of the body in a river. Gnarly. He then fatally stabs a man, possibly the dealing priest, who may or may not have had an affair with his faithless wife. Though it may be a bleak ending to a catalogue of trauma and despair, it fills in the gaps of the story and sheds light on why these flawed characters are the way that they are.
As a final disclaimer, I want to reiterate that this is merely my interpretation of the band’s fictional non-linear narrative. It’s entirely possible that I’ve misunderstood whose perspective is adopted for which albums, or if it changes between songs, but I suppose that’s the nature of lyrics. We always end up twisting their meaning and making them about ourselves in some way. Nonetheless, I find the concept of Defeater very fascinating and I hope you do, too. I only know a few people who have heard of them, and even fewer who enjoy their music, so perhaps you’ll listen to one of these records and be totally engrossed like me. I know heavy music isn’t for everyone, but maybe you can look past the delivery for the message. Give them a shot and let me know! Hold fast, dead set.