Which is not to say Slake is an entirely solo endeavour. Single ‘Bonecollector’ represented “both a window into the singular vision of the Californian artist and an embodiment of the collaborative spirit which brings their work to life,” we wrote in a preview, showing off the work of musicians Bridge Gamble (bass), Ryan Albert (additional guitar), Lil Spakoski (synth/theremin), Oona Albertson (drums) and Maya Bon (additional vocals) as well as a whole crew of directors, editors, camera crew and performers on the accompanying video. But it is Claire’s vocals to which all of these elements are in service, something apparent from opener ‘Bauhaus the Dog’, a slow-building song where the delivery is at once haunting and cathartic.

You know I think Bauhaus can hear me thinking about him,
he’s sending all his friends to do his sleuthing.
Cause when I’m porchin’, stoop-sittin’ all alone
the dogs that cross my path are darker than
obsidian.

The rest of the album unfolds in this manner, walking a porous line between sincere emotion and something more foreboding, as though each moment holds both intrinsic beauty and its own latent dread. Take the striking details of songs like ‘Go Fish’ (“eating dinner that’s wrapped up like a present / opening fish bones all folded in parchment) and ‘Big Gray Marbles’ (“Open mouth / I’m looking in / Yours is different than his / you’ve got bright pink, blood-filled skin”). Or the way songs like ‘Back and Forth’ provide heartbreaking tenderness while upending the superficial epiphanies so common in confessional art. “Telling them that I / don’t know if I / can do this much longer / Whatever this in that statement meant,” Claire sings on the latter, before describing the moment of silence before the sister answers. “When you open your heart to the world it opens itself right back up to you.” Yet, unlike the Hollywood version of such a scene, the moment continues beyond this nugget of wisdom. “It’s not what I wanted to hear / because that’s something that I already knew that I knew,” Claire continues. “Isn’t it so unfortunate that we always gotta be the ones to make the first move?”

Coming near the end of the record, ‘1026’ is perhaps a standout. A perfect example of how Slake manages to transform an otherwise mundane moment into something sacred. Or rather, restore the sacredness latent in every moment to its full luster. And by sacred, we mean something beautiful, yes, but also serious, daunting, even scary. Reflecting on both the past and present via everything from framed photos and accumulated possessions to strange dreams, ‘1026’ treats the present as a flat plane facing in two directions. Look one way and we see everything which makes us who we are, look the other for something even more terrifying.

I’ve got this framed picture of us three – my grandma with my name, my daddy, and me.
In it I am a few hours old
my first day in the world.
The longer I look at it the worse it gets, I own this image that reverses death.
Well that Virgin Mary statue looks just like my mom, I guess that makes me her son –
I didn’t mean that at all.

Let’s Get Married is out now via Cherub Dream Records and available from the Slake Bandcamp page.

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Doomking is a new synth-based project about “about being trapped by ones surroundings and spending too many late nights stuck in the internet”, which I’m sure is all too relevant for many of us. The sense of being stuck, both physically and mentally, runs through the record, clear thoughts and actions enveloped by a vague inertia and confusion. The general atmosphere is summed up by a quote on the Bandcamp page:

“I was out walking on the first hot night of the year. I was heading in the general direction of my old friends’ house, who I hadn’t seen in a while. My friend moved away last year. Realizing this I start to head back home. It’s 2 am, my friend would have been sleeping anyway.”

In a way similar to the Island Eyes record, A Mark of Something No Longer In Existence paints the familiar in a grand mythic way, late-night fever-thoughts turned fractured poetry. The desperation here is underlying yet abundantly clear, as if pushed backwards by the superficial stimulation of technology and the dull passing of time, long days turned short by the contemporary narcotic routine of information consumption.

Opener ‘Fernwood Detachment’ serves as a perfect example, the odd imagery and ambiguous visions swathed in expansive synths. The narrator is cast as alone, separated from the other character (a nameless ‘you’) by time and space. “I want to see the ocean,” he sings, lonely. “Without feeling like I don’t / Have anyone around”. ‘Ruin’ is similarly solitary, playing like the soundtrack to a walk through an abandoned town.

“Oh man, I don’t know
What to make of these dreams
I thought I saw
Something come to light
As though transfixed by these projections
And the path was open wide”

‘The Infinite Eye of Mount Douglas, I See My Love’ brings to mind Concatentating Fields by Trouble Books, its simmering synths feeling simple yet strangely organic, like some prehistoric sea. Dreamier still is ‘Home of the Ray Lake Dancers’, Soles’s vocals weaving in and out of finger-clicking percussion and synths which ebb and flow like a tide:

“Reading old emails
To get through the winter
Dragging my body
Behind you, behind you
I will stay inside
This empty room
I know it well
I saw a dancer
Waiting for summer
I saw a dancer
Waiting for summer”

‘Old House’ swells gently like a sunrise, like a city at night, before the vocals enter quiet yet prominent. “This, this is the house,” Soles sings, “where I plan to die”. The words are sung without fear, as if voiced from the clutches of an ever-deepening dormancy that numbs both mind and body. The end of the track sounds like a surrendering to this sensation, and album closer ‘Mark of Something’ is a 13-minute continuation, a float through a foreign landscape gently warped and obscured, the first footsteps into the final dream.

With its mixture of impassioned sentiments and general despondency shrouded in a haze of confusion, this is a release very much of and for our times: Where technological connectivity is driving, paradoxically, isolation and detachment, where words and videos from faraway places are piped into our silent twilit bedrooms like prescribed dreams.

You can buy A Mark of Something No Longer In Existence now from the Doomking Bandcamp page, including the novel and rather lovely picture frame/digital download format.

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