Swapping duties on vocals, drums and guitar, Coley and Maria have been making music as beautiful and brooding as the skies above their native Olympia, Washington for more than 10 years. At their best, the songs on their sixth album – wandering between post-rock, stoner rock, doom and black metal – address life’s horrors with acute honesty and fury.
The title track, described as “a hymn of gratitude for queer and trans ancestors, known or unknown”, is a triumph. Coley bellows “holy are the names” in a spine-tingling affirmation of those ancestors’ bravery, at the climax of eight minutes of profoundly gorgeous guitar tone ranging from simple, clear notes to layered distortion. Coley has something of Lingua Ignota’s steady but traumatised ecclesiastical delivery, and across the album they make much out of big repeated statements like these: “We live in the light of the burning world”, “I would run to your side” and particularly the 20 incantations of “I long for thee” on Ruins. Grief, perhaps, leaves you with nothing but a few words.
There’s more of that amazing guitar tone on Woe and Winter’s Light Pt 2, daubed like black impasto across these songs, while Maria delivers bruised vocal balladry on DTA (“death to America”) before the song is subsumed in the sampled noise of a mass protest.
The trouble with using simple riffs is that they can easily skew naive or simply dull; too often in the quieter sections, the duo opt for ponderous arpeggiated runs of notes that make their songs feel pedestrian rather than merely slow. But when they bring in groove (as on Woe), or let noise fill up the space – be it shredded or screamed – they carry the listener aloft to a hard-won clarity.
