Maryn Jones (of All Dogs and Saintseneca) released The Offer, her first release as Yowler, back in 2015. It was an album that smouldered with a quiet intensity, what we described as “a study in the art of minimalism, of the exchange between poetry and negative space.” Now Jones is back as Yowler with a sophomore effort, Black Dog in My Path, a record that possesses the same singular spirit as its predecessor, though works to explode it in several directions, proof (if any was needed) that Jones can make weird and affecting songs in a variety of guises. Label Double Double Whammy describe it as a “sonic quilt” that’s “pieced together from various musical inspirations and drawn from a period of great personal change,” which serves as a neat description of the diversity, both musical and emotional, on the record.
Opener ‘Angel’ begins relatively sedate, a song built on acoustic guitar and gentle percussion that wouldn’t be too out of place on The Offer. Although as it grows it reveals itself to have a clarity that wasn’t present on the previous album, a kind of loose-limbed easiness that feels like a development for Yowler. ‘Holy Fire’ is another song that begins gently, a lonely attic-corner folk song that’s all murmured guitar and almost whispered vocals. But its final third signals a more conspicuous change, ushering in the stylistic shift that makes Black Dog in My Path so compelling. First the acoustic guitar drops in tone, a subtle portent of what’s to come, before a tumultuous wave of noise rolls in like a force of nature, washing away everything in its torrent, including any misconceptions that this record is merely The Offer part 2.
As if to immediately back this up, ‘Where is My Light?’ is a great ominous beast of a thing, crushing guitars like something from a Midwife record giving Jones’ words a newfound gravity. The sentiments roil and snarl, ominous messages from a troubled mind, or rather a mind troubled by its surroundings. As Jones explains: “It’s about being an artist under capitalism and all the mess that that can cause in your brain. It’s about missing the natural world and all the beauty you see when you’re on the road, and hating your stupid fucking phone.”
And where is joy among these pieces that we scream into the space?
Where is my gentle reason, and the light within my cave?
Where have you been?
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The intimate crooned regret of ‘Awkward’ is followed by the positively ethereal ‘Aldebaran’, a space age hymn of pulsing synths and arcane veneration, a mismatch of style and scope that Jones pulls off with grace. The grooviest Yowler song to date, the beguilingly blaspheming downbeat disco of ‘WTFK’ is another change of pace. The background bass rumbles like an unseen basement party bouncing up to street level, a room full not of dancing kids but something unnatural, a coven or dark congregation swaying in the dark.
All this is not to say that Yowler has abandoned what made The Offer so great. ‘(Holidays Reprise)’ is a wordless return to a song from that album, while ‘No’ is breathy midnight folk where the soft tones take nothing away from the almost Biblical writing, its stark and visceral images of blood and marrow and blazing suns. Another quieter song, ‘Petals’ is as delicate and pretty as its title suggests, hushed and emotive in both sound and theme. “Sing softly the song you wrote like honey from your throat,” Jones urges. “Petals fall in front of you, stick in your hair, it’s all I can do I leave undone and bend to your bow.”
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‘Grizzly Bear II’ casts the narrator as a kind of superstitious figure, doomed to bring misfortune to those that cross their path, and the suffering such a curse entails. The idea carries through to closer ‘Spirits & Sprites’, which again returns to bare-bones guitar and vocals that often seem barely there yet burn with uncanny feeling all the same. The writing is vague and affecting, words imbued with an esoteric power that fuses intimate internal thoughts from the corporeal world with something altogether more supernatural. “I bear the mark, I am sigil,” Jones sings, “to the spirits and the sprites, but I promised not to listen and stay in my life.” The natural and supernatural converge on Black Dog In My Path, and Jones has re-purposed Yowler as the conduit between these two dimensions.
Black Dog In My Path is out now via Double Double Whammy and you can get it from their webstore, or the Yowler Bandcamp page.
