Blog Atrocity apparel

Madison's The United Sons Of Toil make a quite noticeable point of not being a show-off kind of band. Oh, sure, the group plays wrenchingly great sets of noisy post-punk, but, then again, I've seen guitarist-yeller Russell Hall turn down calls for an encore by simply grumbling, "Encores are for rock stars!" I've seen them bang out most of an album in a single day. The group's only conspicuous indulgence is in the liner notes to its two albums, 2007's Hope Is Not A Strategy and 2008's Until The Lions Have Their Historians, Tales Of The Hunt Shall Always Glorify The Hunter: Hall annotates each song with a brief explanation of its heady theme. Most of the songs on Lions, for example, were written about acts of genocide, from the American Indians to the Belgian Congo to Ireland. For example, Hall notes under the song "The Forced March Of Manifest Destiny": "The first step in any war is to convince those doing the fighting that their enemies are demons."

Well, that quote also shows up on the band's new T-shirts. Of course, if a band like this is going to do something as extravagant as printing T-shirts, it better stick with its "populist theoreticians" persona. And so it does: Down one side of the shirt runs a long historical timeline of genocide, from "1432-1890: Native Americans" to "2003-???: Darfur."

You could almost imagine Huey Freeman from The Boondocks wearing this T-shirt. The maroon print on a tan shirt makes for a non-flashy, utilitarian, revolutionary's-uniform kind of feel. At the very least, it says a hell of a lot more than that Che shirt you threw away five years ago (or should have). These shirts will be available to the "party faithful" when the Toil opens fellow local band Zebras' record release show at The Frequency on April 16.

"I work with, and am fascinated by, infographics, and wanted to do something in that space," says Hall, who recruited a co-worker named Victoria Gritton to design the shirt. "Originally, it was a horizontal timeline with a symbol showing the number of people who died. It became obvious very quickly that getting accurate numbers was difficult and highly debatable. The design then shifted to a vertical list—a litany of man's inhumanity to man."