Outside of the comfort of hope

Catharsis: A release of emotional tension, as after an overwhelming experience, that restores or refreshes the spirit.

Envy. Been listening to Envy a lot in recent days. First time in a while. Trying to get at the core of their brilliance. 2 things emerge.

1) The hope of the soaring instrumentation vs the despair, frustration, anguish of the singing combining to create something beautiful. So many other bands do the cathartic thing but Envy rise above, which isn't to say it isn't cathartic, but it goes somewhere else, somewhere beyond. Where the beauty lies is in the dissonance between the two elements. The power of the singing means that the hope of the instruments never gets the better of it, never allows the emotional outpouring of the screams to point forward, to move beyond the present - the music gives us the illusion of a a future while all the time the singing tells us that there is nothing but the insistent present. Yet, at the same time, the hope of the instrumentation is never drowned out by the screaming. It's always there, soaring above. Neither element wins out, there is a violent tension at all times. Perhaps in the quiet moments we could imagine that the future wins, but the contemplation of the vocals implies a looking to the past, and again the tension comes about, a tension which is only heightened by the eruption of the vocals into violence, never dispelled.
The past is another illusion, the futility of the screams tells us that - what was will have been an illusion, what is still to come will only ever be an illusion, we only ever have the present. This is what the vocals tell us. The music on the other hand builds on the past to point to the possibility of the future.
I want to suggest here that what this dissonance between the two levels represents can be equated to something else: that what the vocals are insistent against is the music's vision of hope. I take this idea from Lee Edelman's No Future, and his idea of "the queer" as a figure against "reproductive futurism". I'll quote from the first chapter:

... politics, however radical the means by which specific constituencies attempt to produce a more desirable social order, remains, at its core, conservative insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its inner Child. That child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention. ...
the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form.
Rather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, this ascription of negativity to the queer, we might ... do better to consider accepting and even embracing it. Not in the hope of forging thereby some more perfect social order - such a hope, after all, would only reproduce the constraining mandate of futurism ... - but rather to refuse the insistence of hope itself as affirmation...

Is this not what we see in Envy? The vocals refusing "the insistence of hope itself as affirmation," as expressed by the music. And further, in the very anger, despair (whatever name you wish to give them) of the vocals, can we not see the impossibility of which Edelman speaks:

When I argue, then, that we might do well to attempt what is surely impossible - to withdraw our allegiance, however compulsory, from a reality based on the Ponzi scheme of reproductive futurism - I do not intend to propose some "good" that will thereby be assured. To the contrary, I mean to insist that nothing, and certainly not what we call the "good" can ever have any assurance at all in the order of the Symbolic. ...
Such queerness proposes, in place of the good, something I want to call the "better," though it promises, in more than one sense of the phrase, absolutely nothing. I connect this something better with Lacan's characterization of what he calls "truth," where truth does not assure happiness, or even, as Lacan makes clear, the good. Instead, it names only the insistent particularity of the subject, impossible fully to articulate and "tend[ing]" towards the real."

Outside of the comfort of hope and railing against the illusory future, is this not an apt description of the vocal power of Envy? "the insistent particularity of the subject." And the "impossible fully to articulate," leads us nicely into...
2) The language barrier. This is of course not an issue for everyone. But not knowing Japanese, is an issue for me. I have never (till today for the purposes of writing this) checked out any translations of Envy's lyrics. I think the lack of understanding of the words actually enhances the pleasure of listening to the music, not in some mysterious, exotic way, quite the opposite. It is because the lack of meaning allows for the illusion of a full communication, of a non-alienating language. When listening one knows precisely what is being said at the same time as one knows nothing of what is being said. Words don't get in the way of the meaning. One is free to have them communicate whatever it is one wishes to have communicated - one appears to come closer to meaning here than one would come if one knew precisely what was being said. Having looked at the lyrics, they do seem to be quite good anyway, nothing too concrete, but I still prefer to not know... to stick with what I want them to say.