Dark Ages’ new album comes with a goodbye

Jordan Carr and Justin Betterton sit across from me, side by side on the couch at Carr’s apartment, though Carr frequently gets up to change a record. At the moment, it’s Gang of Four’s Solid Gold.

We are supposed to be conducting an interview about lead singer Carr and guitarist Betterton’s hardcore band, Dark Ages, on the eve of a release gig for its second album, but the conversation meanders. In part this is because the two men have been friends for more than a decade. But largely it is because they’re less eager to talk about the fact that Dark Ages, which also includes Jason Shrout on drums and the Bloodbirds’ Mike Tuley on bass, is about to disband. It’s a subject on which neither Carr nor Betterton wants to dwell.

Dark Ages’ Vapor came out on Sorry State Records back in May, but the release show is finally just taking place Saturday. It’s the band’s first performance in nearly a year. It’s also its last, capping an eight-year run. Betterton and Carr don’t see the gap between gigs as the reason for Dark Ages’ demise so much as an indicator.

“Everybody in the band has so many things going on that are really pressing,” Betterton tells me. “There’s no room left to do it and really be a functional band. No matter how much we liked to do it, trying to get four people that are working on a hundred different things in line to agree ‘we’re going to do this at this time’ became untenable.”

In addition to a day job, Betterton hosts the weekly KCDIY Radio, KKFI 90.1’s Monday-night punk show. Carr runs Oddities Prints, located right below his apartment, on the first floor of the Crossroads building that he owns with his wife, Danni Parelman. There wasn’t much here when the couple bought the space two years ago. In fact, there was only kind of a roof and no utilities.

“These rooms did not exist. This floor did not exist,” Betterton says, gesturing around the space where we’re sitting. “It was like a pile of bricks — a shitty pile of bricks. … It was seriously just this gutted shell that was just falling apart.”

That, Carr thinks, is among the reasons that Dark Ages has run out of time.

“It’s all-consuming to do that,” he says of rehabbing the building. “I just didn’t have the time it took to make a band super-great — especially Dark Ages, of all bands. When I’m exhausted, it’s hard to think about shit and scream — especially about shit that is very, very, very important and personal — when I’m just mentally somewhere else.”

Carr isn’t kidding about the intensity that Dark Ages requires of him. The evidence is hammered throughout Vapor. Listening to that record is like climbing aboard a rocket car on rails and letting it propel you full speed, without any control of where it takes you.

But even within those 17 minutes, there’s the audio equivalent of white space, in which the songs take a second to breathe. Halfway through Vapor, in “Mr. Sun,” there’s a moment when all sound drops out except for a succinct rat-tat-tat on the snare. It’s just a six-count, but then there’s a key change — all within a 45-second song. Here, and throughout Vapor, Dark Ages manages a fine line between controlled anticipation and catastrophic noise.

“When it comes to a point in the song where the natural progression would be ‘do this,’ we’re always like, ‘Let’s not do that,'” Carr says. “If it feels right doing a part five times, we’re only going to do it three. If it seems like it should go longer, we’re going to do it shorter. If it seems right here it should go insane, we’re going to kick it in the other direction. It’s about making it interesting and not being predictable.”

Vapor is exactly the sort of record that both Carr and Betterton like: a 12-inch 45 RPM record with 10 songs — in and out, like a good set. But the most apt summation of what Vapor means to the band comes not during our interview but via a message from Betterton the next morning.

The songs on Vapor, Betterton says, sound dark and disturbing because they reflect the circumstances surrounding his life at the time that he was writing them. In a six-month period, Betterton lost four members of his family, including his brother and the grandmother who had helped raise him.

“I was trying to find a way to write songs that sounded like my life, that sounded true to what was going on,” Betterton writes in an e-mail. “Some people want to engage in mythmaking, and some want to underplay and shrug off the real guts, as if the work made itself. I’m more interested in truth. And that’s the truth of this LP. After all of that – Jordan was building a building, my family kept dying – none of us seemed to have enough left to give the band what it deserved.”

So “Horizon,” the closing song on Vapor, isn’t the sound of something falling apart; it’s the sound of something being dismantled. And its repeated mentions of control recall the opening of Dark Ages’ 2011 debut, Can America Survive?, and its declarations of change — almost as if the band has come full circle in the course of two full-lengths. What started as four musicians with endless possibilities ends with Dark Ages reaching for control and trying — very hard — to find peace. In a way, Betterton says, Vapor serves as the perfect bookend. Carr agrees.

“You don’t ever plan the end of a band,” Carr says, “but there always is an end to a band. … It’s a different time for all of us, and I’d just rather say that and have that be how it is.”