“For many months in second grade, I suffer a recurring nightmare: everyone I love is transforming into werewolves.” So writes Claire Cronin in her 2020 memoir/horror study Blue Light of the Screen. “I run from room to room searching for my parents — the last ones left unchanged — and when I finally find them, I see their backs are turned. I’m relieved at first — they look like they are still normal — until suddenly and horribly, they shift. They have long faces, hairy snouts, and fangs. I know that they will destroy me and wake up.”
The dream is far from the only menacing vision Cronin outlines in the book, though it is perhaps one of the most dreadful. A child made to watch as the familiar turns strange and violence closes in, the end of the world ultimately unfolding not just with the loss of her own parents, but perhaps by their very hand. The image resurfaced upon playing Cronin’s new record The Bruise, out now via Orindal Records and A Moth Object. A release which follows in the footsteps of predecessors Bloodless and Big Dread Moon to present the personal as a portentous experience, the real world coloured by the spectral presence of ghouls, ghosts, God and His absence, but, significantly, does so from different circumstances. Now a parent herself, we find Cronin newly aware of her position as a link in a familial line. Mother and child, a pattern repeated. A chain of spectres over her shoulder. A baby in her lap, peering up, starting to cry.
Opener ‘Black Water’ plays as a direct engagement with these ideas, Cronin keenly aware of the duality of motherhood, her ability to bring relief with a familiar face or else a fanged destruction. It’s “about the poisonous kind of pain that some of us inherit from our parents,” as she explains. “I’m on both sides of that now, as a mother and a daughter.” Even the act of giving birth itself is presented as its complicated bipolar whole. Not just a continuation of life but also a form a death, as though mortality shimmers within the animal experience of pain and blood, the ever-present shadow side of the otherwise brilliant coin so often held aloft. “When I first wrote this song, I wasn’t sure what the imagery was about, but it felt emotionally true,” Cronin continues. “Two years after I finished it, I had a harrowing experience while giving birth to my second child. That nearness to death and life felt like something the song prophesied.”
With death seeping into even the most metaphorically pure of images, and Claire Cronin hardly being known for the brightest of sounds, you will not be surprised to learn The Bruise is a record dark in theme and tone. Beyond the existential terror of the personal lies grander visions of the same. The world in which Cronin gives birth is one cowering in the face of a myriad of interlinked catastrophes, from the collapsing climate, genocide and war to the alarming greed and hubris of the billionaire tech elite. There likely hasn’t been a day in human history where the world did not feel on the brink of an end of some kind, yet the contemporary moment feels especially precarious. The best lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity. The gyre is widening, the falcon is deaf. You know how it ends. The fires that choked the songs of 2021’s Bloodless have only grown more intense in the intervening years, so how could The Bruise be anything other than apocalyptic? Blue Light of the Screen quotes Elaine Showalter: “The human imagination is not infinite, and we are all bombarded by these plot lines every day. Inevitably, we all live out the social stories of our time.” It stands to reason, when the stories of our time are reaching their conclusion, we live out our own end.
Which is to say The Bruise is a kind of personal eschatology developed in situ. An album inspired by doom in its various guises, be it cultural doom, personal doom or the doom of the family, its folk sound enriched by the slow black depths of doom metal and its various avant garde drone/ambient relations. Cronin’s husband and collaborator Ezra Buchla was more involved than ever, performing strings, guitars, percussion, piano electronics and whispered bass harmonies, as well as recording and mixing the song’s in the couple’s home in Berkeley, California. Plus Julia Holter (harmonium), Tashi Wada (synth), John Dieterich (of Deerhoof, on synth), Jeffrey Byron (percussion) and Mark Wessels (musical saw) also lent their talents, summoning a sound loaded with the weight of metal yet without its immediate intensity. A soul without a body, or else a body without a soul. All feeling and no catharsis. Suffering without meaning. Yearning without release.
Take the despair of ‘Before the End of Time’, a song which sees Cronin attempt, and ultimately fail, to list the things she will miss when everything is said and done. “Helicopter search beam / thought it was the holy ghost,” she sings in the song’s central line, one which encapsulates the mood of the entire album. The miracle revealed to be an optical illusion is the most galling of things, not least because of what such a mistake reveals about the would-be witness. A childish faith unveiled and then extinguished within the same moment. Pathetic desires bubbling up despite everything. The absence of the divine doubled in the embarrassment.
From there, to the creeping beat of a bodhrán, The Bruise marches on. “If anyone above has a song of love / I can’t hear it now,” goes the despondent ‘There Is No Sound’, a track which rings with the alarming clarity of silence, while all is neither calm nor bright on the Claire Cronin version of ‘Silent Night’, the traditional hymn snared by the profane as she details a childhood home, the drab, desperate environment coloured by the afflictions of those who inhabit it (there’s a “humming of mistaken words,” the trees are “a seasonless green,” the cars on the street “shine like some set of teeth” and the grass can be heard “struggling to grow underneath”). Again the maternal figure is central, a presence at once conspicuous and opaque, making anguished confessions while simultaneously retaining a fundamentally incomprehensible air. Another parent cast canine in the eyes of a child, albeit this time a more subtle transmogrification. The mother as knowing, unknowable, wild.
I remember you wanting to die
To be up with your Jesus on high
But you drove us to school with a glint in your eye
and you hid in the dark like a dog in the park
who does not want to come back inside
Informed by a celtic spirit and images of war, the electrified ‘Poison Ivy’ stirs itself with something like solemn fury, while ‘Save a Little Hell’ and ‘Iris in Pyre’ counter with a torpid weight. The tracks move slow enough to trap the listener in their lethargy, the sonic equivalent of our contemporary woe, draped like a wet blanket and clinging close to the skin. “’Iris in Pyre’ is about how it hurts to see terrible things,” Cronin explains. “I’m singing about burning the irises of my eyes, of dyeing my clothes black in a kind of funeral pyre. The images in the song speak to threats of violence, social sickness, and fascist displays of power. It’s the feeling I get when reading the news.”
This feeling gestures towards George Steiner’s idea of ‘absolute tragedy’. “A point, gathering all blackness to it,” which Cronin explores in Blue Light of the Screen. The absolute tragedy is governed by senseless villains and totally devoid of hope or meaning. Suicidal stories that play out within, as per Cronin, “a universe where hell is all that waits for us.” A world, perhaps, where even parents become werewolves and maul their offspring. Where such curses follow the bloodline, poisons pass between generations. The absolute tragedy is a wheel destined to forever turn.
The fatalism continues across the closing tracks, not least ‘Wait in Nothing’ with its arrogant adversaries and predators, and appears to reach its nadir on closer ‘House in the Pines’. “Hope is what you had when you were nine,” as Cronin sings in the refrain. “Now it’s bigger than that / It’s a white cloud when you’re running out of time.” Populated by garbage on fire and bare winter shapes, the song sets out into the bleak landscape of the record and, much like the second grade Cronin in her werewolf dream, finds not solace but doom. “Straight out of hell, I heard a bell / Deep in the ground at the back of the yard,” she sings. “I shut my ears and then appeared / some angel snake with a silver guitar.”
But while it is tempting to read the apparition as Satan himself come to punctuate the apocalypse’s final sentence, thus sealing Claire Cronin’s absolute tragedy, there is another reading which cannot be ignored. One tied to the central tension which has long proved the engine of her work. Because as terrible as the underworld might be, especially when found within your own garden, it cannot exist in divine isolation. A demon from hell is proof of heaven, just as silence implies the existence of its inverse. A fear of the end suggests a love for the present. What if God might only be revealed in negative? “The only reason I might want to draw a circle in chalk and ask a demon to enter is to see if I could really make it happen,” Cronin writes in a salient section of Blue Light of the Screen. “If the demon came, then I would know that God’s reality was laced into our own.” Hope is what you had when you were nine but now it is bigger than that. Salvation might be found in its own antithesis, and this is the time of wolves.
The Bruise is out now via Orindal Records and A Moth Object and you can get it from the Claire Cronin Bandcamp page. Various editions are available, including a limited edition cassette and a hand drawn zine of lyrics and art by Cronin herself.
