4th Movements/t2018 Drag City There is life after DEATH after all—and just like you’ve heard, it hinges on accepting You-Know-Who as your lord and savior. 1980: it was the dawn of a new age. Built on the broken backs and bodies of those who had hoped and dreamed for a better world, the '80s made it clear: that world wasn’t coming. A generation and more plunged into the abyss. But what of Death? The HACKNEY brothers were no different from anybody else—in the heat and tumult of the 1970s, they’d seen that new world coming. They’d raised their voices righteously, transforming with outrage and hunger their all-in-the-family power-trio ROCK FUNK FIRE EXPRESS into the legends called Death. The combination of BOBBY and DENNIS’ pile-driving rhythm, older brother DAVID's hard-rock guitar leads and an effervescent combination of lyrical angst, missionary zeal and vision-spirit were an unknown hybrid on the African-American side of Detroit in the mid-'70s. These were the sounds the world knows today as For the Whole World to See—but at the time, the brothers managed only to self-release two songs on a basically undistributed 7˝ record, which caused no label anywhere to express any interest in a record deal for the band called Death. Time for THE 4TH MOVEMENT. Death had plenty of existential/spiritual elements to them; a desire to know where they stood in the big picture was always key to the Hackneys’ musical ambitions. As The 4th Movement, they would direct all those inquiries to Christ. But the raw spirit of Death was still the driving force behind the music; the sound of The 4th Movement captured the trio with rough-hewn intensity as they reached new heights of composition, creating an album-length set of songs that verged on Punk/Christian opera. It would be years before it would occur to any other musical act to try such an outrageous thing. Recorded in their new home base of Burlington, Vermont and released by the group on their own Tryangle Records imprint, The 4th Movement was destined for private-press notoriety in the world that was coming.
