Coma Beach “Jesus' Tears”
Revenge and punks goes hand in hand. There’s certain truth in anger and vengeance: the consequence and aftermath of tragedy that demands contemplation. Inspired by Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Gordon, “Jesus’ Tears” is an episode from Coma Beach’s debut album, The Scapegoat’s Agony. Originally recorded and released in 1995 and released in 2021, the album depicts the delusional state of an unnamed anti-hero. As he imagined himself being crucified along Jesus Christ, the man vowed to avenge those who was responsible.
Driven and disillusioned, turmoil meets exhilaration in the 7th song from The ScPegoat’s Agony. Sonically, “Jesus’ Tears” is mind-blowing. It depicts a burning transition from the grit and darkness of 90s’ grunge to a piercing angst that can’t escape the room to the eventual “punkification”—revenge. In driven, exhilarating rhythm, the intensified track blows your mind through hauntingly palpable sonics and evocative lyrics coiled in noir aesthetic.
“Jesus’ Tears” is brutal. Riding waves of emphasised backbeats and high-speed flickers of electricity and fire, It has less to do what they channeled, but what they created and provoked. Coma Beach seems to have a way of reflecting societal issues through weaving music making into fictional storytelling. In a sense, The Scapegoat’s Agony is like a mirror into the past, but somehow still deeply resonating with the current.
Read our interview with coma Beach and learn more about the behind stories of “Jesus’ Tears.”
Punk Head: I love how you combine literary fictions and philosophy with music making. ”Jesus’ Tears” has a dark anti-hero take on the Crucifixion ofJesus, what was the creative process like for this track?
Coma Beach: Our creative process would generally work something like this: one of oursongwriters (singer B. Kafka, guitarist Captain A. Fear or bassist U. Terror) would come up with a story idea, mostly already put into concretelyrics; in some cases, those lyrics would have to be translated from German into English, as happened with “Jesus’ Tears,” for example. After that, our guitarist Captain A. Fear would work his inimitable songwriting magic by wedding suitable chords to the lyrics and then off we would rush to our rehearsal basement to blast out the new songs in full force😉.
As track #7, “Jesus’ Tears” fits quite well into the overall narrative of our album The Scapegoat’s Agony, as it depicts one of the unnamed antihero's delusional states of mind, with him imagining being crucified next to Jesus Christ and vowing to avenge himself on those he deems responsible for his suffering. Consequently, the following episode in the antihero's excruciating mental and emotional odyssey, as laid out in “Astray (Fallen Angel)“, witnesses him assuming the treacherous persona of a Christ-like would-be saviour. What could possibly go wrong here?😉
PH: Was there a particular work that inspired you to experiment and experience literature through music?
Coma Beach: Actually, there were several authors, artists and philosophers whose works, consciously or subconsciously, had a major impact on our music and our lyrics. The first one to mention here would be Irish playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett, who was generous enough to lend the title to our album The Scapegoat’s Agony, which is a direct quote from arguably his most famousplay Waiting for Godot and perfectly encapsulates one of the main topicalthreads running through our album: the existentialist view of the world’sutter meaninglessness and the necessity to soldier on in spite of this apparentlack of a higher purpose in the human condition.
Other crucial literary influences included Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, with his satirical-sarcastic approach to the absurdities ofhuman existence; William Shakespeare’s plays, especially some of his tragedies, such as Hamlet, Macbeth or King Lear, with their characters having to suffer through existential and – not infrequently – self-inflicted conflicts; or Arthur Schopenhauer’s system of a radical metaphysical pessimism.
Add to this some deeply unsettling motifs of the-nightmarish-in-everyday-life, as employed in the works of Franz Kafka and director David Lynch, forinstance, and – voilà – you get The Scapegoat’s Agony😉.
PH: What was your history with punk rock?
Coma Beach: Like a lot of musicians, we started out covering several songs from our favourite bands, some of them punk or punk-ish, such as Sex Pistols, Ramones or Die Ärzte, some of them post-punk, such as The Cure or The Jesus and Mary Chain. When we finally began to create our own material, our songs at first turned out to sound more in the post-punk vein: “Passion" and “Absurd", tracks #6 and #10 off our album, are perfect examples of thismore despondent streak of ours.
Starting with “The Past Of The Future” (track #1), “Nothing Right” (track#2) and “A Madman’s Dream” (track #4), our music began to take on moreand more of a raw and unbridled classic-punk quality and energy, whichwould become kind of our signature sound.
PH: Can you tell us more about you as a band?
Coma Beach: Our band was formed in 1993 by singer B. Kafka, guitarist Captain A. Fear and drummer M. Lecter, with bassist U. Terror and rhythm guitarist M. Blunt completing the lineup. After extensive touring throughout Germany, we recorded and released our debut album The Scapegoat’s Agony with the German punk label Impact Records in 1995. Only one year later, we split up and, well, that seemed to have been the end of it. Short, sharp and quick, as it were😉.
In 2021, however, with the advent of various different streaming services andright in the middle of a global pandemic to boot, we decided that the time was right to once again unleash our relentless aural assaults upon an ailing and unsuspecting world: and so here we are😉.
PH: What would you like to tell your supporters out there?
Coma Beach: It has been immensely encouraging and rewarding to find out that there is still an open-minded and enthusiastic audience for the type of music we created almost 30 years ago. So thank you, all our dear supporters out there, known and unknown, thank you from the bottom of our hearts for listening, sharing and caring, we really appreciate it very, very much🙏🤗❤!
