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.

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“Sharp mind, eternal youth
I’ll be the first to never die
Nice thought, and I’m never gonna lose it”

If that all sounds dark then that’s because it is, but there is something both fascinating and thrilling in songs so direct and confrontational. Protomartyr’s music is imbued with a certain sense of exciting terror, a DeLillian dread that we know we should escape yet can’t help but stand beneath in open-mouthed awe. At least now you know you are not standing alone.

RIYL: Post-punk, Ought, ruminations on death

Favourite songs:

You can buy The Agent Intellect now from Hardly Art or the Protomartyr 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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“A dark love poem about self-discovery, realizing the things you love, close friends and adventure, limitations and failures, and bouts with depression”

Van Vliet is an interesting songwriter, not afraid to ply his trade across a diverse of genres. As well as the fragile folk songs as On The Water, he also writes doom metal with his band Ulthar and theatrical post-punk for the now defunct Da Comrade. You get the impression that Van Vliet is an artist confident in his abilities, drawing from the twin wells of creativity and experience.

Chicago artist Nnamdi Ogbonnaya has created a new video for their song ‘Born in Reverse, a strange stop-motion collage that sits perfectly with the lyrical themes of death, decay and, naturally, life (a similar theme to that of Young Jesus’ Grow / Decompose). The figure in the video, made up of a mish-mash of human and animal parts, is subject to confusion and terror and joy as life lives and dies in front of his eyes. The track itself a great introduction to On The Water, highlighting Van Vliet’s intimate, impassioned vocals and delicate arrangements which place the songs somewhere between the folk songs of Keaton Henson and Bonnie “Prince” Billy:

“Autumn leaves are falling to the ground. They decay but they are becoming something else. All will be and all will be born again. Finally all will be formless. All things must go. All things must go that way”

You can buy Cordelia now via the On The Water Bandcamp page. Nnamdi Ogbonnaya also has a Bandcamp page, where you will find his wonderfully strange multi-instrumental compositions.

P.S. On The Water are currently touring the US. You can find all the dates and details here.

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The Wytches are members of what is essentailly the garage rock-revival-revival, joining bands like Screaming Females and Krill in a sub-genre that is attempting to make rock darker and weirder. If you think strange surfy, grungy rock would appeal to you then check out the video below, shot by Steve Gullick and cut by Hoodbats.

Pre-order Wire Frame Mattress from Heavenly in the UK, and Partisan in the North America.

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If the song wasn’t already creepy enough, Heather Rappard teamed up with Justin Lees to make a surreal art inspired video. If you’ve ever wondered what live action painting might look like, look no further.

You can get ‘Dark Arts’ on a pay-what-you-want basis on the Baby Cages Bandcamp, and the video can be seen below. The duo plan to release the LP in the near future so keep an eye out for that too.

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