Nature's Revenge: Tunes For A Vengeful Planet

Photo illustration by John Seaborn Gray

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We like to think of the planet we live on as "Mother" Earth, a caring, nurturing parent figure who we thoughtlessly abuse. Well, we at Rocks Off don't know if you've noticed, but Mom ain't exactly helpless. In fact, sometimes she seems less like a benevolent hippie goddess and more like a PMS-ing Old Testament deity. Every year she kills a bunch of us with hurricanes, mudslides, tsunamis, earthquakes, and other "natural" disasters that are little more than a shrug of the shoulders for her, yet can have repercussions that last hundreds of years to us puny humans.

Hell, right now Mother Earth has one of her little magma spouts spewing ash all over Europe for no good reason. From Iceland! Jesus, we thought we could trust Iceland. It just goes to show, you can't get too comfortable with this floating ball of dirt and fire we zip around the sun on. Sure, she may be the only reason any of us are here, but that doesn't mean she has to like us. So Happy Earth Day, now here are some tunes from a vengeful planet.

​Skinny Puppy, "Nature's Revenge"

You can never be too sure with Skinny Puppy, but this seems to be a song about the Earth's weather more or less turning on us... or at the very least could certainly be interpreted as such. There are multitude ways nature could take revenge upon us, but that's the only one that's concretely alluded to in the song's lyrics. Kind of a shame, really, but Skinny Puppy have always been more about hissing vague threats than painting clear, stark images. It's what gives them such a killer atmosphere. ("Killer atmosphere," get it?)

Andrew VanWyngarden & Ethan Leinwand, "Supervolcano"

We mentioned the Iceland volcano earlier (whose name, for safety reasons, you should neither attempt to read nor pronounce), but that's nothing compared to what's going to eventually happen when the gargantuan caldera beneath Yellowstone National Park pops. Or, you know, one of the other four supervolcanoes which could explode any day now and doom us all. Andrew VanWyngarden of MGMT learned of these boiling hot pools of inevitable death in his Earth & Environmental Science class and composed a peppy, silly, upbeat song about it with one of his friends. It's really quite bad, yet way more entertaining than anything on MGMT's new album.