Just two months ago, Minnesota indie rock legends Low released a new record, HEY WHAT. Almost painfully topical, the album paints the present as a time marked by a lack of both control and hope. The mood is captured best on ‘Days Like These’, a spacious, glitching track that builds toward not some affirming or chaotic crescendo but enveloping silence. “No, you’re never gonna feel complete / No, you’re never gonna be released,” Alan Sparhawk sings, neutering any lingering hope with medicinal bluntness. “Maybe never even see, believe / That’s why we’re living in days like these again.”
At the same time, almost 2,000 miles away in California, musician and writer Claire Cronin was working on an album of her own. Although a very different record, Bloodless is a product of this same moment, and both encapsulate the American milieu at the beginning of the twenty-first century’s third decade. Released via Orindal Records, it is a collection of songs crafted at the bleeding edge of this world we have made, a world apparently unravelling at the seams. “Some days, the air was so toxic that we couldn’t leave the house,” Cronin says of recording at home in Berkeley during one of the worst wildfire seasons California has ever witnessed. “Days passed indoors with our air filters going, while the sky outside was orange and dark from morning until dusk.” This very physical destruction was chased by one less visible but no less brutal. The whole planet was rocked by the pandemic, prolonging the sense of confinement and inviting death into the everyday.
The time is captured in the album art, a portrait of Cronin at once intimate and oddly distant, blurred as though fine details failed to persevere in the face of such surreal fear and violence. “The recording process was almost hallucinatory,” she continues. “I would lose my sense of time in the music’s repetition and the heat of the tiny room where I was playing. I felt trapped and hopeless and terrified of the virus, of the fires, of what was going on in American politics.”
To return again, briefly, to Low—pressed in an interview about HEY WHAT, Sparhawk acknowledged the lack of hope on the record, but rejected the label of cynicism. Hopelessness can hold purpose, he argued, even if just to foster a sense of endurance or a deeper level of engagement with reality. “Maybe the first step in really being hopeful is to stop being hopeful,” he says. “Are you really being hopeful or are you hanging your hope on things, when clearly we can’t count on things?”
The opening and title track of Bloodless arrives at a similar conclusion, however reluctant the admission might be. “I know I’m a man, thorn in my eye,” Cronin sings, “and my mind is unbearable.” The lines describe a suffering rooted in the uncertainty of mortal existence. The only escape, the track suggests, is the complete transcendence of the physical world and its connotations. A move beyond the corporeal body itself. But even across this one song, Cronin follows Sparhawk in identifying the dishonesty at the heart of such wishes. The counterproductive nature of hoping beyond hope.
Must be strange not to see light and air
held back from the heat bodies bring
Taken to a field, never got blessed
swallowed by the sound of angel wings
Bloodless, bloodless
Bloodless, bloodlessI did not give up
I did not get drawn up
It was not my luck
or the book of trust
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A lack of hope does not equate to a lack of possibility. Tracks like ‘Through the Walls,’ with its shadows and voices and bloody heads, emerge straight from the mystical imagery of predecessor Big Dread Moon, and those familiar with Claire Cronin will appreciate Bloodless as a continuation of an ongoing project. A receptivity to the metaphysical and occult that’s part of an attempt to communicate with an elsewhere, an action performed in the face of the impossible inevitability of death. Cronin has always felt like an artist reaching through the dark, wishing to hear or be heard, simultaneously fearing an answer and dreading the cold lack of response. Bloodless is more rooted in physical or human textures than the previous record, but this is its own horror. Presence and absence are the sinister twins of Cronin’s haunted world. Her suffering centred both on what might lurk in the dark and the very dark itself.
Feel this, feel this, feel this
I don’t want to be in your body
What I want is something above me
big as the law
This is the space Bloodless occupies. A heightened awareness of both life and death which offers a new physicality to the sound. The characters are “real as mammals,” or as ‘Through the Walls’ puts it, “Strong and wild and hot / Brave until you rot.” Both the delivery and arrangements remain sparse and ethereal, Cronin’s guitar supported for the most part only by layers of viola from Ezra Buchla. But there’s a notable immediacy too. The sense that whatever is being communicated, however dreamlike or strange, is happening in this world, in this moment. The shadows and light of ‘I Could Not Be Blood’, ‘No Forcefield’ and its taste of iron on the tongue. The themes of possession, of channelling, of floating high above oneself, perhaps never to return.
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The move toward the physical is therefore not some renunciation of the spiritual, nor a denial of its influence, rather an incertitude in the exact shape of its power. A symptom of our inability to time its arrival. An acknowledgement that the only certain thing is us. As Sparhawk put it, “If you’re looking for landmarks to hang hope on, eventually they’ll all be gone and you find yourself still there.”
Yielding to the darkness of the moment, closer ‘Now I Don’t Leave’ reimagines the individual’s role in the present, and illuminates its starkest truth. “I came out of the rain and the backwards glance / but the coming was not good,” go the opening lines. “Now I don’t leave, now I don’t leave / Those who persevere will be destroyed / and I am not the destroyer in this story.” There is no hoping our way out of our situation, just as there is no wishing God down to save us from our bodies. If He is present and watching, His intentions remain mysterious. With no way to transcend the physical moment, we must instead embrace it, endure it, come to terms with our own flesh. After all, if God gave us anything, it was blood.
Bloodless is out now via Orindal Records and you can get it from the Claire Cronin Bandcamp page or Orindal webstore, including special ‘Smoke’ or ‘Black’ vinyl editions.
Photos by Vlada Syrkin Werts, video by Marcos Sánchez, cover photography, illustrations & design by Claire Cronin