16 F E AT U R E T T E
W/BLOOD COMES CLEANSING
Photo: Valarie Rene
BY DAVID STAGG It’s almost too easy to tie in the name of the band With Blood Comes Cleansing with what’s actually happened to them. Before getting a phone call from vocalist Dean Atkinson, I had a typical list of questions prepared for him, hoping the answers would lead to good conversation. But after the first question, Atkinson sounds like he’s just so happy to be around. Not just as in, “I’m very happy to be in this car ride to Albany,” but as in genuinely happy to even be alive. About two years ago, Atkinson left With Blood Comes Cleansing, and from what it sounds like, the band seemed a little risky financially to him, that it was just time to figure out what to do with his life. That year, he was working as a 9-1-1 dispatcher among two or three other jobs, but was battling some intense personal issues on the level with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and mental disparity. During that same year, WBCC continued on in his absence, signing a deal with Blood and Ink Records, and releasing their first full-length record, Golgotha. (Atkinson didn’t really play a part in that release, writing the lyrics for one song on the disc, “My Help”.) Eventually, during the lifespan of Golgotha,
two other members of the band hung up their instruments, leaving founding guitarists Jeremy Sims and Scott Erickson back at square one—but this time without Atkinson. Atkinson’s issues still seemed overwhelming. He was seeing a psychologist a lot. He was battling alcohol. So much so, he ended up spending 45 days in a mental rehabilitation clinic. But despite all the mental anguish and troubles he had been running into, he never once abandoned his relationship with God. When he talks to me about that year, he referred to it as “The Great Depression” and initially called it a long story and didn’t particularly delve into it. He continued on and eventually saw a need to speak a bit more on it: “I don’t mind sharing what God brought me through,” he says. What got him through his year-long depression eventually became a theme for the band, a theme for his lyrics, and, by default, a theme for their sophomore record Horror. In Atkinson’s words: “During (the year I left the band), it was the toughest year of my life. I was battling alcohol, and that was something God had delivered me from years before. I just kept on stumbling. I wound up going back to a rehabilitation clinic, but I never banished my relationship with the Lord. (The clinic) helped, but I saw God use me there, like with really
suicidal people in treatment. I was able to sit and share the Scripture with them. He is the one that brought me out of it. I’m completely free of all that today. I’m living proof that Jesus can set you free of those things.” And that’s the “Cleansing” part: Atkinson is now married (since December), and is on the road doing what he loves. This afternoon, the band’s new line-up (Atkinson, Sims, Erickson, drummer Matt Fieler, and bassist Dennis Frazier) is on their way to Albany, NY for a show on a tour their label, Victory Records, is putting on. Horror came out in January 2008, and it’s a heavy 12-song set. But it’s heavier thematically as more or less an account of Christ’s love and mercy on earth, his suffering, and, finally, his redemption. “Christ came into the world to save and not to condemn,” Atkinson says, a living example of his quote. “The first part of the album was all what he did for us not to have to suffer. The last part is about what life is like today; we’re trying to show the way of escape through the beginning of the record. We’re not trying to condemn anybody, just to show them love. … If anyone can take something from our band, we truly want to bring that message of hope and love to people in a way that Christ would.”
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3/31/2008 11:33:12 AM