Having formerly recorded as JPH, jesus is the path to heaven is an experimental outfit led by North Carolina‘s Jordan Hoban which combines folk and drone to weave a minimalist yet richly evocative sound. Debut hell verses introduced the project, a three-song EP which drew on the King James Bible to evoke visions of the underworld, landing somewhere adjacent to the Southern Gothic folk of Jim White or Johnny Dowd. Each subsequent release had built upon this foundation in increasingly strange and visionary ways. Be it the richly mournful soundscape of ‘Distantimacy’ or the haunted transmissions of recent album Holy Hour, with its musique concrète style.
jesus is the path to heaven are back with a brand new release, Book of Moths. Written and performed at Mepkin Abbey in South Carolina, the EP takes its lyrics from the King James Version and the Mepkin Abbey Psalter, and marries the minimalist folk of hell verses with the more ambitious drone styles of later releases. The result is what the band describe as “a dark devotional for the mothgod,” a collection of solemn and often unsettling songs grounded in the profound weight of its surroundings. Songs, that is, fitting of their titular creature: fragile and vulnerable, capable of great destruction, ultimately drawn to the light.
Sung by Caroline O’Neil, opener ‘job 4:12-19’ is an acapella rendition of the title’s verses, the only other sounds that of ambient textures and the retreating footfall of the conclusion. “How much less in them that dwell in houses of clay,” go the final lines, “whose foundation is in the dust, which are crushed before the moth?” The obscure image blurs the line between the destroyer and destroyed and elucidates the competing themes of devotion and corruption across the record. A place where the flesh and the spirit meet.
It is the tension between these concepts which fuels the release, from the way the bright faith of ‘length of my days’ distorts into peculiar noise to the cloistered ‘psalm 39 (mepkin psalter)’, its poignant hush slowly infiltrated by outside sound. But nowhere is it clearer than the striking ‘YMMBCALTM’. A plaintive hymn turned horror film soundtrack, its gentle atmosphere interrupted by disturbing sawing repetitions as though some malign force has announced itself. Something insectile or mechanical brought forth from a gloom world to torment us, even the most searching and willing in the end consumed. “Lord, what have I to wait for?” Hoban asks. “”hen you correct me / you make my beauty to consume away like the moth.”
art by jph