Label this track from Teargas & Plateglass “dark.” Not dark like teen angst dark, but dark like Darfur, like the Balkans, like Kenya, like Cambodia. Dark like genocide. Dark like 4,000 more U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq than W.M.D.s found in Iraq; that kind of dark. “One Day Across the Valley” is almost too much; the percussive drum track, the spoken word memory of pure violence, the sparseness of the sound. Like the photos from My Lai or Rwanda, you want both more and less in the given output — more justice, less brutality, more hope, less reality. “I felt a lot of pain,” says the narrator, and it’s hard to understand how this could not be a universal response. From the album Black Triage, with accompanying videos available on the band’s website.
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