jesus is the path to heaven has now returned with the deadchrist, a brand new album released via Blade Records which continues to push this aesthetic in new directions. Opener ‘terror at the fountain’ is indicative of the album’s tone, a stark, hushed folk song where intimacy is no protection against bitterness and despair. There are elements of David Bazan in the religious guilt and fury of the lyrics, Sufjan Stevens in the soft vocals, as well as the likes of talons’ in the despondent quiet.

The effect is corporeal insignificance set against something dark and sublime, as captured by the pair of songs ‘you find your way’ and ‘there is a fountain called hope’. “You find your way in / people walking, frightened / by sheet lightening / down the mountain, and / in sheets of rain you read / the source of hallelujah,” Hoban sings on the first, “though / never read by sight, only by / following the groove of water / leading down the mountain.” It’s a song at once ominous and devotional, the line between dark and light collapsed into a promise of deliverance. The second emerges from this with a tentative yet building tone, repeating the title over and over not so much in belief as to coax to life the possibility of such a thing. “There is a fountain called hope.”

The simultaneity of darkness and light is the spirit of the deadchrist. Take the pain and beauty of ‘the fawn’, where death is both an end and a beginning, or ‘lord, you called’ with its unique blend of optimism and torment. Hoban has described the jesus is the path to heaven project as one exploring the “effect religious trauma has on the human body,” though it stands apart in how it does this with such a direct engagement with Christian themes. Suffering as the central tenet of existence. Agony and love as the same thing. “all my life / never thought I’d see / a sight both bright and / darkening,” Hoban sings, “like a kite / fluttering / falling down / without a string // all the men and women know / christ is dead.”

the deadchrist is out now via Blade Records and you can get it now.

cover art by alexis trice

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jesus is the path to heaven are back with a brand new release, Book of Moths. Written and performed at Mepkin Abbey in South Carolina, the EP takes its lyrics from the King James Version and the Mepkin Abbey Psalter, and marries the minimalist folk of hell verses with the more ambitious drone styles of later releases. The result is what the band describe as “a dark devotional for the mothgod,” a collection of solemn and often unsettling songs grounded in the profound weight of its surroundings. Songs, that is, fitting of their titular creature: fragile and vulnerable, capable of great destruction, ultimately drawn to the light.

Sung by Caroline O’Neil, opener ‘job 4:12-19’ is an acapella rendition of the title’s verses, the only other sounds that of ambient textures and the retreating footfall of the conclusion. “How much less in them that dwell in houses of clay,” go the final lines, “whose foundation is in the dust, which are crushed before the moth?” The obscure image blurs the line between the destroyer and destroyed and elucidates the competing themes of devotion and corruption across the record. A place where the flesh and the spirit meet.

It is the tension between these concepts which fuels the release, from the way the bright faith of ‘length of my days’ distorts into peculiar noise to the cloistered ‘psalm 39 (mepkin psalter)’, its poignant hush slowly infiltrated by outside sound. But nowhere is it clearer than the striking ‘YMMBCALTM’. A plaintive hymn turned horror film soundtrack, its gentle atmosphere interrupted by disturbing sawing repetitions as though some malign force has announced itself. Something insectile or mechanical brought forth from a gloom world to torment us, even the most searching and willing in the end consumed. “Lord, what have I to wait for?” Hoban asks. “”hen you correct me / you make my beauty to consume away like the moth.”

art by jph

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