We last caught up with Salem sludge slingers Baragon back in the pre-pandemic days of January 2020, which at this point feels entirely like a previous lifetime. But the heavy quartet returned with another furious crusher yesterday (July 11), and it throws a reference point back even deeper down yesterday’s timeline, to the mass shooting at the 2017 Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas.
One person in the band had a family member at the festival, and thankfully, that person survived. But they quickly conveyed the shock and horror of the experience, which has helped shape Baragon’s “Fish.” It’s heavy shit, both the song and its inspiration, and that seems fitting for a band named after a fictional beast, a kaiju, from Japanese monster movies.
“This song is about a real conversation with a family member after they survived one of the now countless mass shootings in the United States,” writes Baragon’s Kevin Landry on Bandcamp. “I could still hear the fear in his voice. The lyrics recount the horror of being under attack by a domestic terrorist and calls out the multi-billion dollar gun lobbies that pay for our politicians to do nothing to protect the American people in the name of weapons sales, who also feed the weak-dicked right-wing fear-mongering populism that too many idiots believe in; that the government is coming to take the guns away from law-abiding citizens. All while their fellow Americans die.”