Deep Cuts #14: Killing The Dream – 'In Place Apart'
Impassioned melodic hardcore straight from the heart of Sacramento.
Artist: Killing The Dream
Title: In Place Apart
Release: September 13th, 2005
Label: Deathwish, Inc.
Listen here: Bandcamp | Spotify
The live music experience has been a huge element of my life for over seventeen years—almost half my time spent on this godforsaken planet.
I’ve been to so many hardcore shows, basement matinees, metal gigs, and multi-day festival line-ups that it’s quite literally impossible for me to recount them all. I’ve seen frostbitten black thrash in Oslo, frenzied cosplay punk in Osaka, endless conveyor belts of stage dives at This Is Hardcore fest in Philadelphia and a host of intimate performances at venues around Australia.
Yet one of my greatest musical regrets is never having the chance to see Killing The Dream. The Sacramento hardcore outfit were active from 2002 to 2011, throughout much of my adolescence and early adulthood, releasing three full-length albums alongside early EPs and compilations. Although the group never made it Down Under, the stars also never truly aligned in such a way that my international travel plans synced up with their hectic touring schedule.
And while I’ve had a decade to make peace with this fact, every time I listen to the band’s phenomenal debut album, In Place Apart (2005), I’m still flooded with the all-too-familiar pangs of bittersweet melancholy. Let me tell you why.
In late 2006, I was eighteen years old and completely directionless. After structuring much of my high school studies around STEM subjects and wanting to pursue a career in the Australian Defense Force (lol), I had an extremely early life crisis and ultimately deferred university for several years, taking up the opportunity to work shitty bar jobs instead and get blackout drunk four nights a week.
It was at one of these shitty jobs where I accidentally fell into the role of being a “DJ” for a nightclub’s Friday band rotation. I use the scare quotes here for DJ because—and I cannot stress this enough—I had absolutely no idea what I was doing in any meaningful professional capacity.
I was a glorified jukebox or curated human playlist from a pre-streaming era, hitting the play button on Pioneer CDJ-1000s for no other reason than my own personal taste and satisfaction. Audience and club patrons be damned. But it was also a job that allowed me to carry a milk crate full of booze into a poorly lit DJ booth and empty it at my leisure, so there’s that. (Noticing a theme here?)
Each week, various promoters would leave behind copies of new releases from artists on their roster and other labels with distribution, and I would make a cursory pass through these records to see if anything new was worth my attention. It’s here that I first came across Killing The Dream and In Place Apart.
“Rough Draft (An Explanation),” the opening track of In Place Apart, serves a two-fold purpose. It acts as an introduction to the band’s impassioned take on the melodic hardcore sound, while also delivering a thematic mission statement of sorts.
Droning guitars from Bart Mullis eventually give way to an avalanche of drums and Christopher Chase’s humming bass thrum, striking the perfect balance between urgency and tension.
At the midway point, over Isaac Fratini’s rapid-fire snare roll, vocalist and frontman Elijah Horner erupts into being, his fierce, larynx-shredding scream seemingly powered by raw intensity and narrative sincerity. Cavernous gang vocals sing back the track’s closing line, evoking the communal free-for-all of a hardcore show.
And in just under two minutes, Killing The Dream manage to prime the listener for the complete sonic experience contained within their album debut:
“Where do you go when everything you know is wrong/
If you know anything at all?
Tomorrow always starts so bright, before it fades/
And all the empty faces, they all turn again.
When the lights are off, we’re all just dead again.
Kill the lights, kill the pain.”
Recorded with Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou (Champion, The Hope Conspiracy) and featuring Deathwish, Inc. label figure-head Jacob Bannon’s iconic cover art style, In Place Apart had all the sonic and aesthetic signifiers necessary to become a bonafide hardcore classic.
And while the album might not be revered on the same level as other influential melodic hardcore staples—like Modern Life Is War’s Witness (2005) or Have Heart’s Songs to Scream at the Sun (2008)—its place as a crucial gateway record for me is undeniable.
Without In Place Apart, I wouldn’t have found bands like The Carrier, Verse, Bane, Sinking Ships, Guns Up!, Ruiner, This Is Hell, Go It Aone, Paint It Black, and many more. It’s one of the formative records in my overall musical journey and each listen still brings back that initial rush of excitement and discovery.
Despite whipping through twelve tracks in a hurried 25 minutes, three specific songs stand out for me as being representative of In Place Apart as a whole. First up is a fan favourite, “We’re All Dead Ends”:
“Sing!!” pleads a shrieking Horner, emphasising the phenomenological tug-of-war at the heart of hardcore, a genre that often relies too strongly on formalism and familiarity at the sake of the new and dangerous.
The droning guitar lead-drum roll combo returns once more, quickly followed by arresting verses that bristle with aggression courtesy of Mullis’ furious chord progressions and Fratini’s pounding kit work.
However, it’s the track’s mid-section that yields the real gold here, with a sudden stop-start fight riff that rushes into a massive breakdown section filled with Horner’s withering lyrical reflections:
“We’re all fucked, so fuck it all.
There’s nothing we can do.”
There’s a simplicity inherent to this call-and-response phrase that makes it perfect for a sweaty crowd of angsty adults to sing along, yet it’s also a lyric that’s been stuck in my head for years due to its philosophical profundity.
See, there’s nothing more attractive to youth than the reckless abandon of nihilism. Adult life is way too busy and complicated and hard, so having a worldview that takes all of that complexity, absurdity and lack of meaning, only to summarily reject it in one swift cathartic embrace is utterly intoxicating.
And yet, the older I get (while also withholding any claims to wisdom gained), the easier it is for me to acknowledge how impactful this message is despite its lack of philosophical nuance. And to some degree, I think Horner recognised this within his own lyricism, as the track’s verse directly counters the seductive impulse of the beatdown’s nihilism:
“Sometimes it just seems we’re the ones who hope forgot/
But sometimes, it seems we’re the ones who forgot to hope/
And you’re feeling it again.”
For the nihilist, hope is futile. But for the dreamer, it’s fundamental. The key to moving on and passing through it is acceptance and self-awareness.
After smashing through some shorter, more aggressive numbers, In Place Apart arrives at Side-B standout “Sick Of Sleeping”:
As a writer, I return to this track a lot. And as my writing has developed and improved over time, forming more and more of my life and career, the track’s resonance only continues to grow stronger and more resilient.
Mullis’ angular riffs clash up against Farinti’s effortless fills and tom roll cavalcades, as Horner blasts through a furious screed about insecurity, impostor syndrome, and the inevitability of failure:
“I tried to write... this is all I got.
I tried to sing, but this is how it sounds.
Every thought, every word, everything I don’t deserve.
I’ve held your hand, I’ve weighed you down for far too long now/
And I’m falling again.”
Transitioning into another crunchy beat-down section, Mullis puts the melody in melodic hardcore with a beautiful yearning lead that lifts the track both sonically and thematically, all before everything dissipates and crumbles just as quickly as it coalesced.
Horner closes the track with a pained, isolated scream that repeats the words “I’m sorry” over and over again. It’s a raw, powerful moment on the record, and it never fails to give me goosebumps.
Now we reach the record’s penultimate track, the transcendent “39th and Glisan”:
After digressions through cynicism and insecurity, pessimism and failure, Killing The Dream deliver one of the most uplifting and empowering moments on the entire album, In Place Apart’s true anthem and an ode to grim determination in spite of life’s hurdles.
Here, Horner reflects on trials and tribulations, using the sting of loss and lament as fuel for a relentless burning optimism:
“We owe them nothing, but we’ll never get away.
So we’ll pay our debt with blood and sweat from these moments/
Just words and the hearts where they were born.
Our pockets are as empty as our heads/
And that’s just how it should be.
We’re sick and we’re tired but we’re finally happy.
Sometimes all it takes to find a home is to leave.
And a thousand miles is all it took this time.
We’ve lost it all but what matters is tonight, tomorrow the same.”
For a young kid staring down the path of corporate wage-slavery and rampant materialism, this message hit me like a lightning bolt.
Suddenly, this thing with music and hardcore and friends and having fun all made sense. It wasn’t just pointless escapism, it was an affirmation of the things that really matter, and the things in life that we should cherish and nurture.
It’s hard to pin down exactly, but there’s something about the instrumental cohesion in the track’s finale, with its deafening chorus of gang vocals and galvanized riff from Mullis, that turns a surface-level hardcore punk closer into a generational siren song. Representative of In Place Apart as a whole, it’s a shining example of melodic hardcore at its finest and why Killing The Dream deserve more recognition within the subgenre.
Along with the band’s efforts on their follow-up LPs—Fractures (2008) and Lucky Me (2010)—future acts like Touche Amore, Defeater, and others would eventually take this blueprint and refine it further still, distilling this potent blend of poetic emotion and clench-fisted energy for years to come.
You can find all of the albums in this series in the TPD // Deep Cuts playlist.