want to know what kinda place this freaky skeletal shit is coming from? read erika anderson’s liner notes:
listening to this recording evokes a time when we were barely holding on by our fingernails. ezra had broken bones in his foot, which the cold and rain didn’t help. there were points during that tour where i just kind of lost my mind, and during the recording of heaven there was a moment where i completely forgot where i was, who i was, and what i was doing. can you hear it?
by christ you can. bad drugs. bad vibes. bad things. a veritable swamp of dread. but a surprisingly beautiful one at times.
so gowns. one of them used to be in the mae shi. one of them is in amps for christ. they come together like spook-rock power rangers. churning out some majorly bummed disjointed jams, reworkings, composed of noise and pop and folk and electronics and whatever else you want to chuck avant- in front of. hey, at least it’s a change from post- somethingorother.
it’s like a forty minute fucked up charalambides album for want of a better comparator product. just replace the sweeping warm texan-psyche tones with some haunted mutterings and scratchy string abstractions. the fractured violin scrapes and barely controlled whispers of feedback actually put me in mind of those drawn-out velvet underground stumbling garage drones.
in amongst this folkish personal apocalypse are burbling electronics (yr man ezra was the mae shi’s synthy module music box fella) in the nervy horror movie soundscape mould, oddball deconstructed balladeering and cracked kindof spoken word soliloquies. it’s the spectral confessional on dog that sticks unsettlingly in my skull. disjointed murmurings of rednecks with dogs and child abuse, full of claustrophobic ambiguity and all delivered in this confessional narcotic drawl. an all too real haunted house tale.
this seems more gnarled and vicious and jagged than the two previous records i’ve heard, or maybe that’s just from all the connotations tendriling out from the dark heart of this one. the whole thing seems highly bloody strung, teetering on the edge of some troubled precipice or trapped in a room full of wrong medicine with only the voices in yr head for company.
white like heaven or dark like space? more latter than former on this one. another razorblade filled treat from southern.
