In November last year we reviewed Antumbra Pull by Clarke Sondermann’s Pleasure Systems. It was an album made and released in something of a hurry as a reaction to the news that Sondermann’s partner was gravely ill. “It was timed perfectly in a sense,” Sondermann told us in an interview, “I was able to give him this (in my opinion) grandiose statement of love and gratitude right before everything got distorted and scary.”
Sondermann is perhaps better known as the lead of The Washboard Abs (if you’re not familiar with Recurring Chasms or Have U Scanned Ur Club Card? then go check them out), and has now gathered the band to create a brand new album, Lowlight Visions. Perhaps as a result of the more electronic explorations with Pleasure Systems, the album heralds something of a reinvention of The Washboard Abs sound. Sondermann’s signature vocal delivery is still front and centre, but the songs themselves have morphed from simple folk-inspired bedroom pop songs to something more cerebral, elements of art pop and jazz combining to create some of the most complex and rewarding pop songs you’ll hear all year.
Which is not to say that the writing, hat has always been the emotional core of The Washboard Abs sound, is at all diminished. The record is a continuation of themes on Antumbra Pull, which Sondermann put bluntly in our interview: “songs created in the midst of being thrust into the role of primary caregiver for my partner following his stage IV cancer diagnosis.”
But, because of the forays into experimental pop, the album doesn’t sound as dark and foreboding as you might think, at least on the surface. ‘The Empty Ground’ begins with serene ocean waves and calm and steady vocals, enveloped in an atmosphere that doesn’t necessarily suggest heartbreak and suffering. But on closer inspection, such emotions are grappled with headlong, the track a reminder that sad songs need not be storm-grey dirges. The track deals with all-pervading bad news, and contains lines that are viscerally affecting despite their simplicity. “I’m reminded every time I blink,” Sondermann sings in one such example, “I can’t help but let my spirits sink down into the empty ground.” But it’s not all naked despair either, as Sondermann declares his support no matter how hard the path might be, a brave and very important reminder that love is capable of surviving even life’s most desperate moments.
“I will stay and fight, I will be here every night”
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‘Never Finds You’ is quietly devastating, a song that forgoes any sense of metaphor or allusion in favour of a brave and direct account of dealing with the serious illness of a loved one. “I hear the sounds of laughter floating away from the other room,” Sondermann sings, “I don’t know how to join them, I’m so consumed by what I might lose.” But again the song has an interesting duality, and manages to somehow sound hopeful despite itself. Bright it might not be, but there is definitely something glittering in its shadows. This interplay between light and dark, and indeed the intrinsic relationship the states share, is a key theme for the entire album. As Sonderman describes:
The process became one of my only outlets to process the slew of traumatic experiences inherent to watching your person succumb to serious illness. But, I tried to make it as hopeful as I could manage. In the end, these songs are a reflection on shared love, an acknowledgement of shared fear and trauma, an expression of support, and a plea for the person you love most to stay alive.
‘Elation’ is a shuffling and sliding jazz-tinged number, while the title track is a slow-burning pulse of feeling, the ebbing glow of embers raked and left to settle. ‘Pareidolia’ is a palette-cleansing ambient track, the title strangely apt as we try to pick out recognizably human sounds amongst the swirling atmospherics, before the off-centre pop of ‘Return to You’, distorted guitar and shambling drums lending a disorientated edge.
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Such a sensation is common on Lowlight Visions, an ambiguity or confusion that presses into the spaces between Sondermann’s clearest pronouncements. Just as dark and light mingle and merge, so too do precision and imprecision. Tracks like ‘Play Dumb’ and ‘Eyes Roll Back’ seem caught between epiphany and bewilderment, great waves of certainty expressed but never quite lasting, or else not able to wash away the sense of disarray and dislocation. In this sense, the album’s title begins to take on a higher meaning, the circumstances allowing flashes of profound realization but only with the dark tangle of its being.
‘Shake the Dust’ is track about trying appreciate these flashes as long as possible, about holding onto the light amidst encroaching darkness. Indeed, the same can be said of the entire record, its consistent commitment to warmth in even the worst circumstance—a hospital bed in ‘Shelter’, spring renewal in ‘Brittle Bones’. For this reason, and despite it being a tough competition, Lowlight Visions might just be the most impressive album The Washboard Abs have made. Clarke Sondermann’s music has always been intimate, but this album treads deeper into this ideal than any of his previous work. In the circumstances, it would be relatively easy to make an album of sad songs, but it’s a brave artist who takes the very personal worry and suffering and uses it to build something that’s this complex and multifaceted, vulnerable but not hopeless, forgoing nihilistic dejection in favour of a strange kind of love, an appreciation of what stands to be lost.
Lowlight Visions is out now and you can get it from the Antiquated Future Bandcamp page.
