Darkest Days: Depression and Stabbing Westward

by editor Michele Catalano

Sometimes, an album comes along at just the right time, a perfect match for your mood and your place in life; so much so that for a while it becomes your personality. For me, that time was in late 1998, and the album was Stabbing Westward’s Darkest Days.

I was still settling into my divorce from a year earlier, still dealing with the fact that my marriage had fallen apart brutally and spectacularly, leaving me alone with two small children. I was angry, bitter, heartbroken. Not heartbroken that he left, which was my idea. This was the heartbreak of knowing that I had missed a couple of years of my life while I was disassociating from everyone, that I failed at the one thing a woman my age was supposed to get right. 

There I was, depressed, angry, unsettled in life, with an eight-year-old  and a five-year-old to raise, basically without their father. I wanted more in this life. I wanted to live fully. I wanted to be loved. I wanted revenge. I was getting none of those things. So I would lie in bed at night, listening to music that spoke to those things, music that coddled my despair and sharpened the edges of my anger. Enter Darkest Days. 

I was already a fan of Wither, Blister, Burn and Peel and the EP Ungod, so I knew what I was getting into when I unwrapped Darkest Days one April night. I’d already heard “Save Yourself” and was sure that this was going to be a rage-fueled, hard-hitting album that would hit me right in my soul. My kids were at their grandmother’s for the night; so I put on my headphones, pulled up the blankets, turned off the lights, and waited.

There are times when I’m just a shell

When I do not feel anything for anyone

All I feel is hollow and bruised

Used up and misused

Forced to be someone I don’t want to be

Christopher Hall starts the song in almost a whisper, uttering words that immediately reached me. 

Have I failed somehow or some way

Will the weight of today finally pull me down to drown

In the depths of despair

Where I am alone

Except for my rage?

My rage

My pain

I hate…my darkest days

And that was just the opener. I remember thinking, Oh my god. He knows me. He knows my pain. Christopher Hall is the only person in the world who understands me. Oh, dear reader, my journey was just beginning.

The more I feel

The more I die

Nothing to give

Nothing inside

Everything I touch I break

I pulled the blankets over my head and cried. Everything I touch, I break is my negative mantra. It’s a phrase that entered my head as a child and stayed throughout my life. When I heard those words, a damn burst open. I repeated the song three times and sobbed with each listen. 

Darkest Days as a whole is an anthem for the broken,for the aggrieved, for those in despair. It is dark and desperate and passive aggressive as hell. So, yes, it was meant for me at that particular time. Hall gave voice to the monsters in the depth of my soul, monsters that needed release. The album took me from self-loathing, to blame, to possessive devotion. It’s a love letter, a message of hate, a cry for help.

The middle of the album—the sequence of “Haunting Me,” “Torn Apart,” and “Sometimes It Hurts”—encapsulated almost every emotion I was going through at the time. As I listened, my body and mind felt as if they were in turmoil. I felt my psyche rearranging itself as the lyrics floated around my brain. I felt like I was high, in the dark with this music the only thing between me and oblivion. I felt one with it, a connection so deep and unabiding that I thought I’d never listen to anything else. 

Then I got to the bottom third. “When I’m Dead, “Thing You Hate,” and “On my Way Down” spoke to a very primal part of me, the part where all my anger and bitterness were stored. I had a visceral reaction to these songs, sitting up in bed, tearing the blankets off, pacing around the room. I had a rage that needed to escape, a frustrated anger so deep that it took someone else’s fury to wrench it loose. 

I cried again, tears hot against my face. I went outside and lit a cigarette after the catharsis of “On Your Way Down,” and let myself feel the cool night air and breathe. I felt spent but also like I could go kick the world’s ass, something I hadn’t felt in a very long time. 

This album empowered me. It told me that my feelings were valid, long before that became a therapy catchphrase. It made me feel something besides despair. I didn’t care that I was feeling hate and anger; there was a place and time for those emotions, and I was standing in that target. I walked around the block, trying to clear my head, with the refrain of “I won’t become the thing I hate, I won’t become you” clattering around in my head.

When I got home, I got back into bed, pulled the covers over my head, and started Darkest Days again, from the beginning. This time, I was prepared. I knew what I would feel. I knew the self-loathing, the depression, and the desperation would all surface again, and that was fine. I needed those emotions to be at the surface when the anger kicked in. This was not a bedtime album, but an album to listen to while lying in bed, feeling my feelings. It was the perfect album at the perfect time.

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