However, in the year following the release of their last album, Huebert began to suffer from a severe inner ear condition, a problem which evaded conventional diagnosis. Anyone who has suffered from ear problems will know that they can be far more crippling than you would imagine. You can’t hear other people and can’t tell if they can hear you, leading to a profound sense of isolation and often panic. Indeed, Huebert suffered from anxiety and depression, a problem accentuated by the fact that the one sense he relied on to make sense of his emotions was taken away from him.

In lieu of a clinical solution, Huebert turned to meditation and prolonged silence and eventually began to piece together a new album, rehearsing with his band at very low volumes to ease the pain. The resulting songs ultimately became Nervous, an album that charts the period and explores the interplay between physical and psychological suffering, utilizing a beguiling brand of gothic art rock and the dream-logic of a labyrinthine haunted house, or perhaps of Huebert’s mind during the troubling period.     

The record opens with discordant instrumentation and unsettling children’s choir vocals that swirl menacingly like the theme of an evil cartoon. Huebert’s familiar vocals kick in after a minute or so, whispered through the reappearing choir and Colin Stetson’s sax with an earnest desperation, imploring you to listen. “Sometimes you get caught,” he sings, “sometimes you get away. It goes without saying.” The track sets a precedent of unorthodox song structure, with tracks on the album often morphing into distant relations of their former selves, swerving off in directions unseen.

The second track, ‘Bank Accounts and Dollar Bills’, is the pure embodiment of the aforementioned shapeshifting. It begins with a laidback tropical vibe with breezy vocal melodies, before entering a big, punchy (almost Arcade Fire-esque) chamber pop phase. Around two-thirds through it then mutates again, this time to feature sci-fi synths, before finally reverting to the easygoing slide guitar and thus completing the song’s varied cycle.

‘Violent Motion Pictures’ feels like a dream, with its opaque imagery (“Do you really want to see statues turn all the way around to say hello?”) and abnormal, fluctuating narrative. Stetson’s sax makes another appearance, snaking around like the tendrils of a nightmare and making the childlike falsetto “la la la” chorus sound more than a little ominous. The song switches at the halfway point, escaping its cramped and claustrophobic corridors, a creaky old door opening onto a wide and open plain. Huebert’s whispered vocals ride the swirling air currents, “The devil on your shoulder, it’ll get the best of you”.

‘Oval Window’ is perhaps the most similar to previous Siskiyou releases, a surprisingly upbeat song about the psychological problems linked to Huebert’s ear condition. “Maybe I’m just dreaming,” he sings, “sometimes it’s hard to tell”. The song manages to take a difficult subject and make it somehow triumphant, culminating in the refrain “the roof is spinning around me and I can feel the world below my feet”. The title track begins hushed and restrained (“does it hurt all the time? Yeah, I can empathize”) before turning psychedelic, while ‘Imbecile Thoughts’ is a folk-rock song, like a woodsy version of Wolf Parade, picking up the pace as the lyrics tell the tale of an introvert girl, “you gotta get out of the door girl and go look at the sky and wonder why the sun don’t shine like it should and why you are always so misunderstood”. The song builds and builds as Huebert breathlessly delivers the vocals and drums clatter and guitar feedback wails over everything.

Nervous is an album of dizzying scope and ambition, quite literally the tumult of sound and emotion inside one man’s head. It is by turns dark and creepy, shimmering and vibrant. Siskiyou have never sounded so eerie, so threatening, or so expansive. And I have to admit, I don’t think they have ever sounded so good.

Nervous is out now on Constellation Records.

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Borne out of tragic loss, both of Hildebrand’s younger brother and also a dear friend of his in the aftermath, Ontario Gothic is a very personal, intimate record. But it is not intimate in the traditional sense of explicit heart-on-sleeve lyrics and sparse instrumentation. These are essentially pop songs, in which the listener finds strange, dream-like versions of themselves amongst the layers of ambience. The songs are like a thick layer of smoky fog that drifts and swirls on the currents of Hildebrand’s grief and isolation. Owen Pallett’s strings help create a soothing, spectral sound that has a certain viscosity, conveying the feeling that if you gave it your complete trust and leaned back it would support your weight.

From start to finish the album takes a blend of nostalgia and grief and spins it into something not only beautiful but genuinely comforting. The result is akin to being totally alone in an old dark cathedral that smells of damp and dust and old incense but has the most vivid stained-glass windows and it’s very early in the morning and the sun is just that moment rising to send it’s gentle rays through them.

You can get the album on a pay-what-you-can basis via Bandcamp

Orchid Tapes did release an LP, but that’s already sold out. If you really want it then pester them and perhaps they’ll do another pressing.

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