Last year we introduced jesus is the path to heaven, a self-described “apocalyptic folk” and “religious trauma band” based in North Carolina and led by Jordan Hoban. “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,” we wrote, with “each subsequent release had built upon this foundation in increasingly strange and visionary ways.” Most recently Book of Moths, an album which took its lyrics from the King James Version and the Mepkin Abbey Psalter Songs and set them to an amalgamation of folk and drone, resulting in songs “fitting of their titular creature” as we continued: “fragile and vulnerable, capable of great destruction, ultimately drawn to the light.”
jesus is the path to heaven has now returned with the deadchrist, a brand new album released via Blade Records which continues to push this aesthetic in new directions. Opener ‘terror at the fountain’ is indicative of the album’s tone, a stark, hushed folk song where intimacy is no protection against bitterness and despair. There are elements of David Bazan in the religious guilt and fury of the lyrics, Sufjan Stevens in the soft vocals, as well as the likes of talons’ in the despondent quiet.
The effect is corporeal insignificance set against something dark and sublime, as captured by the pair of songs ‘you find your way’ and ‘there is a fountain called hope’. “You find your way in / people walking, frightened / by sheet lightening / down the mountain, and / in sheets of rain you read / the source of hallelujah,” Hoban sings on the first, “though / never read by sight, only by / following the groove of water / leading down the mountain.” It’s a song at once ominous and devotional, the line between dark and light collapsed into a promise of deliverance. The second emerges from this with a tentative yet building tone, repeating the title over and over not so much in belief as to coax to life the possibility of such a thing. “There is a fountain called hope.”
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The simultaneity of darkness and light is the spirit of the deadchrist. Take the pain and beauty of ‘the fawn’, where death is both an end and a beginning, or ‘lord, you called’ with its unique blend of optimism and torment. Hoban has described the jesus is the path to heaven project as one exploring the “effect religious trauma has on the human body,” though it stands apart in how it does this with such a direct engagement with Christian themes. Suffering as the central tenet of existence. Agony and love as the same thing. “all my life / never thought I’d see / a sight both bright and / darkening,” Hoban sings, “like a kite / fluttering / falling down / without a string // all the men and women know / christ is dead.”
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the deadchrist is out now via Blade Records and you can get it now.
cover art by alexis trice