#32, "Death Threats (to Thom Yorke)," Charlie Daniels Death Wish (2001)

150 Favorite Songs: #32, "Death Threats (to Thom Yorke)," Charlie Daniels Death Wish (2001)

Here’s another one you only know if you lived in the Rio Grande Valley sometime between 1999-2001, and even then, only if you went to shows at Trenton Point. I recognize that writing about songs that only a tiny handful of people know is probably not as interesting as writing about famous songs, but I also think about something Cameron Crowe said twenty years ago, or thereabouts. “Why not wave the flag for your heroes? That’s what Almost Famous is about. Wave it. Lester Bangs? Fuckin’ wave the flag,” he said. And if you were of a certain group of young person in the Valley in that time, the mighty Death Wish were definitely heroes. So go ahead, click "play" and listen for the first time.

This was the first song that friends of mine wrote that validated, for me, what DIY and punk rock and making your own culture meant. There were other songs I loved that my friends had written, but I loved those songs because my friends had written them. "Death Threats," though, I loved because it sounds fucking incredible. I love the first half, when it's a creepy ballad, with a leaky organ and hollow drums and ringing guitars setting a mood that makes the gentle croon about how i know how your hair gently crests around your head / defining its beauty / tension like moths in its mouth seem inevitable. I love the choruses when the organ drops out and the atmosphere stops sweeping across with the wall-of-sound guitars, and Donner sings about and i keep my promise / safe with me.

And then I love the payoff, when the song stops being about creepiness and tension and setting a mood, and the thing just fucking explodes. “Death Threats” precedes most of the screamo that became cliched, that turned the sung-to-screamed dynamic into a cheap novelty, but I don’t find any of that here, for two reasons: One is that the vocals that were restrained and soothing in the first verses are the same vocals that shred to the breaking point, and you can hear the journey they take in the song; the second is that it earns its explosion. This isn't "Hey, check it out, we've listened to a couple hardcore records" showiness—it's a bridge between the haunting atmosphere of bands like Joy Division and the early Cure and the outright menace you get from big Tony Iommi guitar riffs, or from the ferocity of Pantera. It's a big emotional swing, yeah, but it also follows a through-line. 

"Death Threats" earns everything it puts out there. I remember hearing this song almost a quarter of a century ago (holy shit, time is wild) and all of that is still true. I love my spooky songs and mood-setters and tension-builders, and I love "Death Threats" because it was written by friends of mine who knew that all of that stuff could be truly amazing if, after you built all that tension, you released it as aggressively as possible. That's something that most bands who didn't live their brief lives down at a reception hall in the southernmost part of South Texas never figured out. I was, and still am, really proud to know that in these small places, my friends knew things that were hard to learn.