I found In/Casino/Out in a piano room at St. Cecilia’s Hall. No one had came back for their things. It was just a pile of CDs, abandoned, along with a copy of Deftones’ Around the Fur and a burned mix CD that opened with “When I Come Around,” by Green Day. Someone once listened to these albums. But not good enough to take them with her. A college student, probably, a music major. I imagined her with a cool boyfriend who curated her mixtapes as a form of apology that came with a letter. I imagined she broke up with him. I want to thank her for not coming back.
The room smelled of varnish, paper, and moments before rain happened. There were a few windows too small to justify the light they let in. The whole building, a music conservatory for a religious school, was in that state of between past and future. It was a space haunted with footsteps from the living, but you could feel the ghosts that resided there.
So, I took the CDs. I didn’t even pretend I wasn’t stealing. I just took them because it was there to take. Everyone took my stuff. That was the order of things.
When I got home, I played In/Casino/Out on my mom’s compact stereo system and felt like I’d detonated something in the living room. I didn’t understand what I was listening to. That was the important part. It was for rupturing. This wasn’t music. This was sabotage. No. It was music and I loved listening to it –
1. Alpha Centauri
It opens like a break-in: no greeting, no easing in, just a chaotic lurch… like if someone kicked open a door to a room you were in. “I’m the pamphlet and not the author,” Cedric screams, which is to say: I didn’t write the conditions of my existence, I’m just what it produced. The guitars flail like they’re trying to shake off every sound. It’s a contradiction, tight but frantic, structured but hemorrhaging, and caught in their explosion.
2. Chanbara
“Your voltage has got the best of me.” It’s a song and a feeling of being electrocuted mid-thought. It’s all feedback and friction, a parody of sexual tension so violent it becomes metaphysical. “Chanbara,” a reference to Japanese sword-fighting films, gives us duel as form. The vocals are clashing. The riffs spin, then slice, and it’s the sound of a body resisting containment, of language devouring itself, of teenagers becoming political through damage.
3. Hulahoop Wounds
Ankles as roots, fingers as pills and the body dissolves into metaphors until there’s nothing left to feel except nerve endings and nausea. “Phallic tractor beam” is the kind of phrase that should make no sense but burns itself into your cortex. Here, Cedric becomes an unwilling prophet, possessed by the neoliberal grammar he’s trying to exorcise. The song lurches like a creature stitched from incompatible organs.
4. Napoleon Solo
Napoleon Solo is the illusion of calm. The illusion of mourning. It’s the most melodic track on the album, but it is no less violent. It doesn’t shout but it aches. The song memorializes a dead friend, or a dead ideology, or maybe just the dead weight of growing up under a regime that teaches you to grieve privately and consume publicly. “How strange and how perfectly fake” feels like a realization too late to save anything. This is grief with a guitar strapped to its back, screaming into a void that won’t echo.
5. Pickpocket
“Give it a name.” Every act of naming is an act of violence. It’s barely a minute long, but within that time, it demolishes language. You can hear the machine malfunctioning as the band plays like they’re trying to outrun the structure of the song itself. It’s short like it’s sprinting toward the edge of a cliff.
6. For Now… We Toast
A failed celebration. The title reads like a line from a manifesto buried under a warzone. “We toast to nothing” is the clearest statement the album offers. Nothing is sacred, nothing is stable, nothing is left, and yet, there’s a vitality here, a refusal to lie still in the rubble. The song sounds like a nervous system exposed to raw electricity. When Cedric screams, “Write it in ink and then fold the pages back again,” it feels like we scream with him into collapse.
7. A Devil Among the Tailors
No metaphors, no veils. This is anti-Americanism The tailors sew the uniforms. They determine the price of your skin. “So I hear it’s your birthday. That’s one hell of a constitution,” is a sneer aimed at the hollow rituals we’re forced to perform.
8. Shaking Hand Incision
“His incision is his decision.” This track dissects the self like a failed experiment.. The vocals twist and fragment. Guitars push and pull. This is what it sounds like when you realize your body was built to be monetized. No track on the album feels more like surgery performed without anesthesia.
9. Lopsided
A song about asymmetry, and the discomfort of knowing you’re being reshaped by forces you don’t understand. “No, I’m not bitter, I just relate.” It’s the line of a child trying to survive their first realization of structural cruelty. The tempo is slowed but still nauseous.
10. Hourglass
Time isn’t running out. It’s been running you. Hourglass is one of the most terrifying tracks because it hides its violence. The hooks almost trick you and then the lyrics drag you back into the mire. “Lips curl into a cruel grin.” Time here is not linear, it is malicious. The future becomes a predator.
11. Transatlantic Foe
“The protocol to erase your existence has been activated.” That line feels like a government file stamped and sent. The band disappears inside the song. The last minute sounds like a tape degrading.
And after?
In/Casino/Out evacuates. The album is about what happens when ideology seeps into the structure of language itself until the only way to tell the truth is to scream in a dialect.
This was a band that came too soon, for me. This wasn’t the post-hardcore that would become stylized into digestible playlists and festival slots. But this band was legendary because of its unique sound.
Later, At the Drive-In would split into Sparta and The Mars Volta.
I never met the girl who left this in the piano room. And all I have to say is she changed me and added to my taste in music.
𝐃 𝐗 𝐌 𝐈 𝐍 𝐈 𝐐 