Training for Utopia

Training for Utopia were a noisy, restless hardcore band from Sacramento, California, that made two albums and two EPs for Tooth & Nail and its heavy imprint, Solid State, in the late 1990s. They're best remembered now as the band brothers Ryan and Don Clark played in before they started Demon Hunter. But in 1999 OC Weekly called them "probably the most envelope-pushing of just about any hard band out there, Christian or otherwise." And in 2023, 24 years after they'd called it quits, they came back.

Don's band, Ryan's microphone

The Clark brothers are four years apart. Their dad was a pastor when they were growing up, and their grandfather was an illustrator at NASA. "We're both people of faith and we grew up in a Christian home," Ryan told The Great Discontent in 2013.

Ryan got into music first. He started a serious band, Focal Point, as a young teenager, and it signed to Tooth & Nail when he was still a teenager. "We had to have our parents sign the contract!" he told Patheos. Focal Point made one record and did one tour, and then broke up. "We were way too young to cope with it all, and it was very much a reality check for us," Ryan said.

By then Don had a band of his own. Ryan told Patheos his brother "started another band... a noisier thing." "Their singer quit right when I came back from tour with Focal Point," he said. "So I jumped right into that spot."

By 1998 the lineup was Ryan on vocals, Don on guitar, Steve Saxby on bass and Morley Boyer on drums. The brothers stayed in the band for about four years, up to around 2000. "We'd done two full-length records and two EPs, three to five tours, and had played lots of local shows," Ryan told The Great Discontent. "When a lot of our peers were going to college, we went on the road and into the studio," he said. "We completely skipped college, and being in bands was almost our college experience."

Plastic Soul Impalement

Training for Utopia's first release was The Falling Cycle EP in 1997. Their first full-length album, Plastic Soul Impalement, came out on Solid State on 3 March 1998. It was recorded at Eldorado Recording Studio in Burbank, California. OC Weekly called it "a savage whirlwind of earsplitting riffs and apoplectic screams."

It frightened at least one critic. "Few records actually scare me," David Lee Beowülf wrote in Ink 19 in May 1998. He described the album's "shadowy background voices" and packaging that was "dark, otherworldly, and strangely medieval." "It was creepy as heck!" he wrote. "I had to sleep with the lights on that night!"

The album left no doubt about where the band stood. On one track Ryan breaks into a full-on rant against other faiths, shouting "Your book of Mormon, your book of Satan, your Koran/All wrong!" "Yeah," Don told OC Weekly the following year, a little sheepishly, recalling his brother's spontaneous outburst in the studio. "We probably shouldn't have done that."

On 18 August 1998 Solid State released The Split EP, which the band shared with their labelmates Zao. Each band had two songs on it, and Training for Utopia's were "Modus Operandi" and "Police John Police Red."

Throwing a Wrench

Their second album, Throwing a Wrench into the American Music Machine, came out on 2 November 1999. Eric Stenman produced it. OC Weekly said it took the same brutality and gave it "a digital process job." Cross Rhythms heard "the harsh tones of hardcore with more techno beats and left field arrangements," and its reviewer compared the result to "'Achtung Baby' era U2 melded with an experimental progressive edge." The review called it "Unlike anything I've ever heard."

It has songs with titles like "New York City Is Overrated," "Burt Reynolds vs. Godzilla" and "50,000 Screaming TFU Fans Can't Be Wrong." Years later the band called it their "1999 whatchamacore masterpiece."

By then they didn't want to be seen as preachers. "Some of us are Christians, but there's no agenda," Don told OC Weekly. "This has always just been about rock N roll." The paper noticed the new album had no references to "Jesus, God, the Bible or any other churchy words." Cross Rhythms still heard faith in it, though, and said the band were "unafraid of revealing the state of humanity before a Holy God."

A quiet end

There was no big breakup. Ryan told The Great Discontent: "Eventually, the drummer wanted to go back to school, and we were starting to focus on jobs and asking what was next for us." He added that "it didn't seem like the band was going to be that."

Don got a design job at a dot-com in Seattle, and Ryan, then 21, moved with him. "When we moved to Seattle, we put an end to Training for Utopia," Ryan said. He worked in a used clothing store until he got an internship in Tooth & Nail's art department. In 2001 the brothers started their own design company, Asterik Studio, which they later renamed Invisible Creature.

"Two years into my career at Tooth and Nail my brother and I got the itch to do music again," Ryan told Patheos. They wrote and recorded the first Demon Hunter album in a studio in the label's basement.

In 2004 Solid State released Technical Difficulties, 19 tracks drawn from Training for Utopia's four earlier releases. Cross Rhythms said the band put it together themselves because newer fans were having trouble finding the old records.

Out on parole

In November 2022 Training for Utopia were announced for the 2023 Furnace Fest. On 1 September 2023 they released "Out on Parole," their first new song in 24 years, produced and mixed by Demon Hunter's Jeremiah Scott. They played their first shows since splitting up in Seattle on 15 September and Portland on 17 September. Then on 23 September they played Furnace Fest at Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham, Alabama, mixing "Out on Parole" in with old songs like "Two Hands," "The Falling Cycle" and "Modus Operandi."

For those shows the band pressed Throwing a Wrench into the American Music Machine on vinyl for the first time, with "new, reimagined cover art." In October Solid State put its own colour variant on sale in its web store.

Watch

Five official uploads tell the story. "Plastic Soul Impalement" and "Single Handed Attempt at Revolution" are from the 1998 album. "50,000 Screaming TFU Fans Can't Be Wrong" and "New York City Is Overrated" are from Throwing a Wrench into the American Music Machine. "Out on Parole" is the 2023 comeback single.

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