According to a recent post on their Facebook page, Bay Area black metal quintet Ludicra have called it a day.
Admittedly, I came to Ludicra a bit late. I first started listening to them in 2006, when Fex Urbis Lex Orbis was released. At the time I was living in a suburb just outside Los Angeles, working as a publicity intern at Metal Blade Records in exchange for college credit. Although I worked in a small yet busy office and lived with two other people, I still felt utterly alone and isolated for much of the six months I was there. Back then (and now), I have a tendency to be shy and awkward around people I don’t know and making friends is difficult for me. I would often stay up until ungodly hours sitting in front of the computer, chatting with my friends back home and abroad or writing bizarre, rambling diatribes on myspace (I know, I know…). I was homesick and frequently depressed. More often than not, Ludicra was my soundtrack to these late night self pity parties.
The quintet’s music, especially Fex Urbis…, projected the same “alone in the crowd” despair I was feeling much of the time. Ludicra’s black metal wasn’t trudging through the frostbitten forest at midnight, it was walking down an empty city street at 3am after a night of debauchery, smoking a cigarette, and waiting for a dawn that feels like it will never come. It is gritty and urban, scathing and serene, a truly American take on the genre. Looking back, it seems fitting that I discovered them while lonely, depressed, frustrated and impossibly far from home.
Indeed, Ludicra was an endlessly unique and complex entity, a combination of musical personalities that only comes along once in a lifetime, crackling with the juxtaposition of masculine and feminine energies, bursting at the seams with metal’s chops and punk rock’s attitude. They were progressive and barbaric and crusty and rocking… I can only imagine what their live shows must have been like and I’m deeply disappointed that I’ll never get to experience one. Fortunately I have their four albums, each of which is goddamn electric in its own unique way.
So here’s to ya Ludicra. You were one of a kind, and metal has lost a very special band. See you on the dark side, motherfuckers.
THKD 