Fittingly for such weighty themes, Interbellum takes an experimental route, the sound operating as a kind of analogy for the complexity and strangeness of human experience. “Apocalyptic imagery—real, imagined and figurative—permeates the album, and the instrumentation follows suit, warping, distorting and folding on itself,” Mattar explains. “The record plays like a broken music box, its kaleidoscopic melodic songs disjointed and smeared by noise, dissonance and processed sounds.”

Opening track ‘Distortion’ makes this clear both in sound and lyrics, opening with intimate, stripped back folk that grows misshapen, ending as distorted drone. “Feel it all slipping,” Mattar sings, and it is easy to follow him. “Unraveling once again.” The idea of deterioration is one of the persistent features of what is an otherwise diverse album, from the upbeat indie rock swagger of ‘Another Day’ and ‘It’s All Over’ to the nostalgic ‘Ready to Dissolve’ and morose ‘First Light’, the songs continually threaten to break apart and denature, as though some great force is straining their very structure.

‘Ink’ opens like a toy-box lullaby, kicking into slow, shuffled life with a near clockwork rhythm. The effect is that of a music box grown sentient, breaking from the programmed jingle to communicate more sincerely, with human heart. The lyrics deal with the accumulation of the past—items and objects, images and snippets of remembered moments—a mass of discrete things with which we must build the mosaic of our memory.

“well that’s where it started
and I guess that’s how it ends
rummaging through mystical ruins
rescuing tokens of friendships lost

if the past is a jigsaw puzzle
these are its pieces lying about
I’ve kept restaurant bills and ticket stubs
but most of the ink has rubbed out”

‘PQRST’ is a sweeping example of pop-inspired drone, not unlike the warm melancholy of Talons’, before ‘For Air’ emerges from within its own cloud of reverb as something more assertive, the vocals remaining simple as the drums and synths drive on with newfound energy. ‘Some Ghosts’ reverts to a more traditional folk sound, with it’s patient cadence and earnest vocals, before closing track, ‘Weight of Winter’ ties things together with a wistful indie rock ramble.

“we swear not to speak of the past in present tense
there are no new ways of living
there’s only new mornings to set our lives against

gathering our loose ends
we plotted our escape
and spoke of our dreams again
but they’ve had patents pending
since they’ve started taking shape”

Dead Pets, Old Griefs is out now via Ruptured and you can grab it from the Interbellum Bandcamp page.

The post Interbellum – Dead Pets, Old Griefs appeared first on Various Small Flames.