Cincinnati label Whited Sepulchre Records released one of our favourite albums of 2017, Like Author, Like Daughter by Midwife, a record we described as “both powerfully elemental and somehow intangible, the unrestrained power of nature versus the invisible waves that surround us, emotionally pure messages coded in digital distortion.”
The label’s latest release, a split between Brianna Kelly and Skyler Hitchcox’s project Sympathy Pain, has a lot in common with that album. Kelly makes music that’s labelled “liturgical drone pop,” and this newest album is described by Whited Sepulchre as “songs that attach themselves to a fleeting connection with the unseen world while rooting [themselves] in a very real topography and landscape.” Again this is elemental music, sounds tapping into something larger and more ancient than itself. Or, as the label continues, “a submission to a force that continues on with or without our attention/devotion.”
This is apparent from the opening Brianna Kelly track, ‘when you see it’, with its gauzy layered vocals and ethereal atmosphere. The song’s repetition elevates it to something almost otherworldly, a Grouper-style droning mantra that worms it way into your subconscious and starts to sway you with it shifting tides. ‘bright ass sun – big ass trees’ follows with something slow and foreboding, the instrumentation like the ominous throb from some deep subterranean cavern, while ‘To Behold You’ is darkly beautiful, lonely guitar painting patterns like flares across the night sky. Kelly’s vocals, when they arrive, feel indistinct and translucent, swirling around on currents invisible to the human eye.
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Sympathy Pain utilise similar tools to chart vastly different waters. Their side begins with ‘Blanket Burner’, a 13-minute slowburner that would be at home on a Lily Tapes and Discs release. The track ebbs and flows in sweeping waves; the minimal percussion, provided by Casey Hansen, like a laboured heartbeat at the its centre. Follow-up ‘blessthisuglyheart’ is equally patient, creating a grand sense of lingering melancholy that’s hard to shake.
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This unusually cohesive split tape is a wonderful reminder that this sort of music—whether you want to label it ambient or drone or post-rock—doesn’t have to be sterile and barren of emotion. There’s a vein of feeling that threads throughout, and even in the album’s most opaque moments, this elevates it to something rather special, and a worthy addition to the Whited Sepulchre catalogue.
You can get Brianna Kelly / Sympathy Pain now from Whited Sepulchre Records via either of the act’s Bandcamp pages.