Rumble & Scream. “Rumble & Scream: Post-Industrial Sounds in Pennsylkrainia—Act 1,” 2025. Reviewed by Wesley Scott McMasters, Jan. 30, 2025.
“Rumble & Scream: Post-Industrial Sounds in Pennsylkrainia—Act 1” defines itself as “post-industrial folk-rock opera,” and that is exactly what it is, though it is not what you expect when you start. This is a project that you can read, listen to, or both, and any experience will leave you with a sense of nostalgia and a desire to more deeply remember who you are and where you’re from.
The entire “Act I” is narrated by Lattimore Scream, grandson of Betty Rumble and Jeremiah Scream, who shares the history of his family and his home, Holy Crick, Pennsylkrainia, through a mix of storytelling, poetry, and music. The poems stand alone, like “Jeremiah Scream,” a version of which appeared in Red Branch Review(Issue II)and introduces us to Jeremiah at a turning point in his life. The songs, too, exist as individual entities that will make you want to stomp your feet and sing along (“At the Bottom” could be played at the end of any work day). The complete project, however, weaves together a portrait of people and a place in a way that manages to be intricate and straightforward simultaneously. Certainly the stories, poems, and songs are enjoyable at face value, but consideration of the work as a whole in the context of a changing America with a history strongly based in the immigrant experience and hard labor, brings Rumble & Scream into discussions of cultural and historical critique and preservation. Lattimore isn’t afraid to remind his listener, after all, that “Jim Thorpe ain’t Pennsylkrainian.” There is a large and important message here about culture, history, folklore, and home; but there is also a simple love story between Betty Rumble and Jeremiah Scream, who lend their last names to the title and their genetics to our narrator – there is nothing here that isn’t worth listening to.
Where we are from is haunted by the stories of our grandparents that we’ve started to forget. I tell a story about a great-great-great grandfather buried at the bottom of a mountain next to a visitor he cared for until he had to saw his companion’s frozen legs off to fit into the coffin he made. Like any good story, I’ve forgotten parts of it and misconstrued others, and some locals even know it better than I do. By the time my children tell it, I’ll just be happy any of the story remains. Pennsylkranians feel the stories of their people, the history of their land and of their mountains; they know coal mines, know lumber mills, know railroads, know steel mills, know mountain air. Lattimore Scream, the narrator of this folk-rock opera, urges us to remember our stories and our families, as he has remembered his and theirs. “Rumble & Scream: Post-Industrial Sounds in Pennsylkrainia—Act 1” is living and breathing, clapping and stomping, rumbling and screaming history – the way history (any story) should be.