The first time I listened to For Against, it was a track from their bracing sophomore album December (1988). My initial impression was that I was listening to something akin to the Chameleons, especially their earliest releases, but with Mark Burgess’ muscular vocals swapped out for something equally impassioned yet also brittle, like a deadly serious version of legendary producer and Let’s Active frontman Mitch Easter.
It took a while for this uneasy sonic marriage to win me over, but I never forgot how December instantly disrupted my musical bearings. Who were this intriguing band that appeared to have teleported from the post-punk proving grounds of Manchester to the flatlands of Nebraska? What was in their record collection? The perpetual underground music question: Why hadn’t they “made it”?
The standard For Against narrative relies on well-worn (but accurate, in this case) phrases like “criminally underrated”, but no one has captured their particular genius like Jack Rabid, longtime publisher of the indie music magazine The Big Takeover. Rightly situating them in relation to British forerunners and contemporaries from Joy Division to the Sound (perhaps the quintessential “criminally underrated” post-punk band), Rabid and others have done their best to match For Against’s relative anonymity with a rich body of detailed, often reverent criticism. His review of most of their catalogue over at Trouser Press is worth reading in its entirety.
During the long months of pandemic isolation in 2020-2021, I returned to For Against and immersed myself in their music with a new urgency. Something about their mixture of jagged edges and melancholic resignation, always teetering on the edge of either flying apart or quietly succumbing to the weight of history (personal history, in the case of Jeffrey Runnings’ lyrics), spoke to me on days when I often felt like I was swimming through oatmeal.
Nowhere is this truer than on Coalesced, For Against’s remarkable 2002 record, whose cover features a photo of a shimmering wheat field on top of a simple but striking Cerulean blue background. After having Coalesced on repeat for weeks, I realized I had no choice but to write a love letter to it. (Amidst polishing up this article, I also got word that Runnings is now in hospice following a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis.)
What is immediately evident with Coalesced is the expansion of For Against’s sound, which uses familiar colors to paint something much larger, much more ambitious. Imagine, say, Goya taking one of his early portraits, then stretching the canvas and reorienting the image so that the subject of the portrait is now flying high above the ground, simultaneously lost in the dark, mundane frame of the original session yet also starting to feel liberated from it. Like many of their For Against’s mid-career albums, it represents an estuary moment best appreciated in retrospect. The sound is still claustrophobic in ways that have always existed since 1987’s Echelons, yet it is also exhilarating and full of possibility.
The opener, “Medication”, establishes Coalesced‘s “dazzling” (to use Rabid’s word) musical formula: a down- or mid-tempo A section (in this case launched by a simple minor-chord strum that recalls Johnny Marr) to accompany the singer’s self-doubt… and then suddenly, as if a camera shutter has just clicked, we are into a double-time B section that signals the arrival of Runnings’ most direct and hopeful reflections. The second time around, as the latter section spins outward into one of the record’s many extended, arpeggiated codas, he is beginning to let himself believe: “Medication comes in different ways / And I think that we could find a place / I need someone to prove to me / This planet still revolves.”
“So Long” is an affecting portrait of inner turmoil as seen in the singer’s uneasy rear-view mirror (is it really all in the past?). The song follows a similar script. As Runnings bares his soul (“hoping to be safe from what you’ve always known for so long”), For Against tightly follow their oscillating journey through chapters marked by the addition of martial drum rolls and new layers of ringing guitars.
The following two tracks form the gigantic heart of Coalesced, bravely extending the boundaries of the approach of “Medication” and “So Long” in a way that might sound forced or exaggerated in the hands of a lesser band. “Fuel” presents Runnings’ psyche through a kind of musical hall of mirrors, starting with an easy feel reminiscent of Big Star (but without the twang).
Nothing is as it seems, however. As the second verse comes to a close, the metaphorical shutter clicks once again, and we accelerate into an agitated double-time section over which the singer repeats, “Intangible things don’t mean that much – isn’t that sad?” Not content to leave it there, For Against turn on a dime and spin out a stunning coda filled with surprising transitions.
Following “Fuel”, the title track opens and slowly chugs along its minor-key journey, happily resigned to its own repetition, and we are in sonic territory that wouldn’t sound out of place on an early Cure album. But there is an earnestness to Runnings’ opening line (“I wander into badly-lit situations / I get stung / I don’t know why”) that Robert Smith wouldn’t fully recognize from under his carefully-cultivated image of the gloomy godfather who also wrote “Just Like Heaven”. It’s a love song. Not an airy, playful song like Smith’s “Close to Me” or “The Lovecats” nor an over-produced epic dreaming of alt-rock arenas like “Pictures of You”, but a bravely realized expression of something more grounded, more contingent, and more real.
As the fragility of the verse gives way to the triumphant, soaring chorus, Runnings declares, “Through time and test, we’ve coalesced / There’s nothing we can’t do!” Continuing with the unexpected transitions of the album’s earlier tracks, the second chorus is followed by an absolutely breathtaking instrumental bridge that gives me chills every time I hear it. It’s another chorus that soars even more than the last for having inhaled the energy of the bridge. Finally, the inevitable coda, this time extended significantly in the form of a driving instrumental passage that Rabid vividly describes as “a plaintive, repeated guitar figure and matter-of-fact cymbal stops and crashes saying as much as any lyrics ever could”.
Each of the final three tracks offers its evocative charms, and after the almost overwhelming catharsis of the title track, there’s no rest for the weary. “Outside a Heart” opens with a jagged, swirling energy and doesn’t let up for a moment, taking us back to the best moments of December. “Shelf Life” builds from its sadcore verses to a thundering outro, channeling Red House Painters at their most sprawling (think the second half of “Moments”, from 1995’s Ocean Beach). Mercifully, the instrumental “Love You” ushers the listener to the finish line with a hypnotic set of interwoven guitars that refresh the air like a long-lost Smiths track.
Through all of it, as the music alternately hovers and races like a storm that gathers force while rolling over the sea, we are still somehow confined within the singer’s inner monologue. Here, it’s helpful to return to the post-punk canon and emphasize that while the points of comparison are apparent, there are also sharp points of divergence.
It is Adrian Borland’s naked vulnerability, but without the bravado of the Sound’s “Winning” or the sheer joy of realizing a new day has arrived in Borland’s “Brittle Heaven”. It is Burgess’ patented “lone individual who is losing his moorings in an insane world” persona, but without the fist-shaking, sing-along choruses to affirm that we are struggling together in our isolation.
Runnings continuously operates in a not-quite-there world of emotional torment, like a man locked in a cell that is sometimes a sunroom, appreciating the warmth but knowing that it will eventually burn him. With his songs, you are challenged to consider the intoxicating possibility that you, and no one else, share with him the distinction of being locked in that particular room. Coalesced offers the possibility of accepting that reality with grace, knowing that it’s of your own making.
“Make sure you find a big enough place to hide,” Runnings sings near the beginning of “Fuel”, sounding more than a bit like Matthew Sweet (another seasoned Nebraskan alt-rocker who, in a devastating coincidence, is facing his own medical struggles) before the song spits out its bubblegum and finds its post-punk footing.
Coalesced is For Against’s masterpiece. Its gift is to create sonic spaces that are undeniably cinematic yet designed to function as containers for the most insular expressions of self-doubt, regret, and victory (however fleeting). Once you are inside, there is no escaping. It may have been released in 2002, but for me, it waited 18 years to become the indispensable quarantine album.