Last Year, Harry the Nightgown released their self-titled debut on Topshelf Records, a record that combined playful experimentation and ear-worm pop melodies. Now the band are back with a new single, ‘If You Were Wrong’, the first of two for Dangerbird Records‘ Microdose series.

Written during the early days of the pandemic, the track explores a faltering romantic relationship during the era of isolation and stay-at-home orders. But despite the serious subject matter, Harry the Nightgown bring their unique exuberance and intuitive experimentalism to create a deconstructed pop song. Synths sparkle and stutter over distorted drum samples as Perez and Hartling swap vocal duties, giving the whole thing the feel of a squishy, candy-coloured pinball machine. The label describe it as “an earnest lovelorn duet somehow blend[ed] seamlessly with a technicolor synthscape,” which is a pretty perfect summation of its unpredictability, sincerity and sheer ear-popping fun.

There’s guilt in your mind
But there’s only you in mine
There’s guilt in your mind
But there’s only you

It also comes with a suitably out-there video, directed by Russell Hartling. Check it out below.

‘If You Were Wrong’ is out on Dangerbird Records and you can stream and download it from the Harry the Nightgown Bandcamp page.

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“There’s always been this crazy connection between the three of us,” explains Knight. “We clicked musically, but we also felt like we’d known each other for years. We were all outsider kids in school who went through the same coming-of-age thing. When I think of a band, this is how I think it should be.”

Together Rose Dorn make indie rock songs that feel like both commiserations and celebrations of this otherness, resulting in an aesthetic that the band’s bio describes as a combination of “elements of bedroom rock, twangy desert gaze, and melancholic California pop.” After two short EPs, Rose Dorn have just released their debut full-length, Days You Were Leaving, a record which utilises this feeling of being different

Lead single ‘Champ’ sets the scene, a sweet and earnest pop song about the connection between the band members, a gaze back at the high school digital friendship that started it all. “At some point I realized I was dissociating,” says Knight, “cut off from the world around me, only able to feel peace when I was actively connecting with my two best friends through a screen. Nothing else really mattered.” The song comes complete with a video, the debut music video from director Julia Ling Kelleher, which sees a chain of dominoes snake around and tumble in perfect synchrony.

In comparison the opening of ‘Shaking’ feels big and bold, a left-field pop song that sounds like it could’ve been an underground hit in the early 90s. But after around forty seconds things slide to a halt, Knight taking over vocal duties as the guitars subside into a dreamy sway. The song morphs again towards the end, keeping things fresh and dynamic across its three minute run-time. Thematically the song is darker than it sounds. As the band explain, it’s “about a select few experiences we’ve seen spin people out of control, and the coping mechanisms that have brought them back to reality […] from the rejection by a supposed soulmate to the death of a loved one.”

Another song that deals with a sense of detachment, ‘Collar’ finds Knight pining for someone long-gone and the explores the rootless feeling of lacking a clear direction for the future.

I feel like a stray dog
with a beautiful collar
on a beautiful lawn
keep searching for someone who i’ve lost
but there’s no signs on poles
telling me to come home

There’s a considerable degree of diversity across the album. From the hushed slow gathering of opener ‘Big Thunder’, to the short shot of LVL UP-style slacker pop of ‘LRP’ and ‘HYC’, Rose Dorn continue to surprise throughout. ‘Deathwish’ is a standout, all dreamy sweetness meets a kind of morbid matter-of-factness (Rose Dorn exploring their sense of otherness with lines like “Shoelace ‘round her neck, keeps her head on tight, she says she’s talked to god, they’ve been staying up all night”). There’s also a really cool trading of vocals where Knight’s lines sound like dialogue in a short story, giving the whole thing the feel of a strange narrated daydream.

Talking of dreamy, ‘Heaven II’ feels fogged by a sleepy torpor, sparse guitar and cooed vocals combining with minimal percussion to create a kind of slo-mo lo fi pop, while closing track ‘Wish’ is also content to take its own time, although burns bright with a much fuller sound. It’s illustrative of Days You Were Leaving in lots of ways, not least in the way it approaches reflective themes in its own unique, bittersweet, way. It shows that the otherness mentioned at the beginning can often be your greatest strength, and that Rose Dorn have come to value it amidst the shifting seas of life in the twenty-first century. The band put it best in their notes on the album:

“This record is about coming to terms with the complexities of life in time, of learning to love and accept where you’ve been and where you’re going while remembering to love and accept where you are.”

Days You Were Leaving is out now on Bar/None Records. Get it from the Bar None Records webstore or the Rose Dorn Bandcamp page. The band are also playing some West coast shows soon. Check the dates below and head along if you’re able:

Thursday, September 19th – Zebulon – Los Angeles, CA – Ex Hex, Seth Bogart
Friday, September 20th – Starline Social Club / Crystal Cavern- Oakland, CA – Fake Fruit
Saturday, September 21st – Arcata, CA Blondies w/ Spirit Notes , OMW2HEAVEN
Sunday, September 22nd – Portland, OR – Vinyl Underground w/ OMW2HEAVEN
Tuesday, September 24th – Olympia, WA – Le Voyeur – w/ Flying Fish Cove, OMW2HEAVEN
Wednesday, September 25th – Seattle, WA – Vera Project, w/ Dogbreth, Bread Pilot
Friday, September 27th – Boise, ID – Castle Greyskull w/ Buttstuff & OMW2HEAVEN
Saturday, September 28th – Moscow, ID – Modest Music Fest
Monday, September 30th – Reno, NV – Holland Project – w/ OMW2HEAVEN
Wednesday, October 2nd – Las Vegas, NV – TBD
Thursday, October 3rd – Phoenix, AZ – Trunk Space w/ Like Diamonds, Gabi JR., OMW2HEAVEN

Photo by Derec Patrick

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‘Dirt’ advances in an easy sway, reminiscent of Free Cake For Every Creature in its ability to fuse everyday observations with heart-on-sleeve sincerity, painting the picture of a relationship that’s not as easy as the song sounds.

“I want to go
takes 45 minutes with the traffic to get home
here I’ll take off your coat
tell your best friend that you finally got me alone”

Things are darker on ‘Goodboy’, which uses canine imagery to explore the shady side of relationships, the duo vocals presented in friction rather than harmony, while final track, ‘Heaven’ steps into a romantically retro sound, the melancholic pop vibe almost reminiscent of Mazzy Star. The song blossoms into crunchy alt-rock as the band sing,

“I wanna dive into you
you’re the bluest sea I’ve sever seen”

Speak Later is a great little collection of tracks, and hints at the diversity of paths Rose Dorn could take next. Head to their Bandcamp page to get it.

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Occupying the far ambient end of his spectrum, new track ‘endless rain, for limitless pain’ is a cinematic instrumental that’s at once expansive and intimate. Opening with a slow creep, the song gathers intensity as it progresses, as though drawing energy from its own momentum and building into an expansive force. However, despite the grand, sweeping sound of the closing minute, the original playfulness remains, resulting in a single that’s finely balanced and expertly achieved.

Back in August, Micah Vaultz also put out a new EP, At Sonrise, Someone Dies…, an eight-song released of chilled, ambient-infused R&B. As displayed on opener ‘born to die (ft. yuno ito)’, here Vaultz’s sound is slow and expansive, straddling genres to incorporate all of his talents into one swirling mix. Tracks such as ‘micah the prophet’ sound something like bedroom pop played through a hip hop filter, while ‘Master’s Piece (ft. q. sol)’ and ‘Take It (ft. naomi)’ are examples of a more polished, luscious sound, unfurling with a vibe both sultry and mellow. In comparison, the title track is a slow-burn ambient track, shimmering with dreamy focus and wistful echoes which wash with reserved brightness, presenting the sort of comfortable poignancy you can relax back into.

You can find Micah Vaultz on Soundcloud and Spotify, so be sure to explore his back catalogue.

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Brenner’s mother is part Pima, and his father part Cherokee, and the EP is intended as an exploration of his “complex relationship with histories of settler colonialism, subsequent traumas, and contemporary Native identities,” an attempt to create a mode of communication able to convey the sense of loss. Rooted in themes of memory and violence, ‘raze’ is a track of of absence, the various instruments and sound recordings framing a central void, Brenner ranging from lonely natural samples to great, crazed swells of noise, atonal and ominous like staccato fury. As such, the song becomes the sonic representation of the silencing faced by Native peoples, the razing not just of buildings or cultures but the very language with which such destruction could be described.

Another track build from sound recordings, ‘haunt’ opens with a lonely trickle of water before the sound of agitated breathing, as though fleeing some terror or else trying to avoid its focus. Menacing electronics join the frame, the breath setting the tempo of the track, its repetition transforming the images it conjures, from fitful disturbance to immense discomfort and finally overwhelming shock. Following this, ‘silhouette’ feels positively rich, the unintelligible opening giving way to Brenner’s vocals which, despite their haunted quality, at least manage to form solid words. These, coupled with the instrumentation, coalesce into an emotive force which rises to a peak before dropping back into the stark ambience.

“Guess my sight’s been bad all along
’cause I look and I look
and I look and I look

but the books don’t say a thing
no they never
taught me a god damn thing”

‘braid’ follows with near complete silence, voices just audible but not decipherable, before Brenner’s grandmother, Carol Arriaza, recites a poem, adorned with nothing but what could be the ticking of a clock, tape hiss, the distant sound of rain. The track represents the strongest example of language within the release, but her somewhat modest tone suggests the persisting inability to communicate adequately, as though she knows such words cannot begin to evoke an entire history of trauma.

‘stammer’ follows with a drawn out opening, ambient tones stretched with the slow beauty of wide open spaces, before the wisps of something emerge, hovering just out of focus. Eventually, various other voice-like sounds appear, consonants cut short, desperate attempts to speak that result in no success, the words beheaded upon first contact with the air. But ironically, such a failure to communicate ends up saying as much or more than words ever could. As Brenner explains:

With absent, just dust, what I realized is that this loss is a language itself. It is a language that one must sit with and parse through carefully to pull meaning from, a process I will perpetually repeat regardless of how much I come to know about my history, my people, and myself.

absent, just dust is available now from the Pastel Bandcamp page, including a cassette edition. Half of all proceeds will be donated to Freshet Collective, who offer jail and court support to water protectors resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline, as well as education to those in the surrounding areas.

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The intervening years have seen the duo release a variety of singles along with 2015’s full album, White Noise, which saw the Twin Oaks sound grow into grander, more epic soundscapes full of ethereal guitars and pounding drums. Now the band are preparing a brand new EP, Collapse, to be put out sometime this summer. After the unveiling of lead single ‘Eighteen Minutes‘ late last year, we’re delighted to present second single ‘Nothing’ to further increase the anticipation of the EP.

Mixed and mastered by Grammy Award-winning engineer Cassidy Turbin, the track perfects Twin Oaks’ odd ability to sound at once stark and lush, Brown’s contained, ominous vocals cycling with unnerving rhythm, each repetition triggering an escalation in the instrumentation. So while the first verse plays to dark dream folk along the lines of Daughter, the second is accompanied by a near post-rock drum thump, the intensity surging by the closing minutes with a wall of electric guitar and feedback drone.

“Please forgive me, for I have sinned
I’m not my own friend
Feel the weight of the world sink in
I’m drowning in this

Pulling back my skin
Digging deep with it
I’m finding nothing
I’m finding nothing”

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If my appreciation of Young Jesus’ last album, Grow/Decompose teetered on the edge of outright gushing, then it was only because the LA-based band are one such example, at least for me. While I’m not suggesting they deserve to be placed alongside the artistic giants of our day quite yet, there’s something about John Rossiter’s writing and vocals that captures the essence of today as I understand it. At once earnest and detached, devoted and deranged, his characters exist on the leading edge of our secular society, a wild, shapeless frontier whose inhabitants are paralysed by confusion yet subject to the age-old primitive brain-twitch that screams for transcendence.

Void as Lob is a new two-song EP from Rossiter and his updated line-up of Eric Shevrin (keys), Marcel Borbon (bass) and Kern Haug (drums), a release which demonstrates quite perfectly what we’re getting at with the whole important/relevant thing. The A-side ‘Baked Goods’ finds the narrator (and/or his brother, Steve) rising from a melancholic daze with a desperate logic, incoherent or too-coherent for us to grasp, demanding and willing and throwing himself wide open for the chance to raise above our meat-based animal existence. As on G / W‘s ‘Milo’, here the characters are delving deep into a pool of confusion with vigour, as if hoping they might break the surface on the other side and emerge into clarity.

“There is a logarithm entered backwards that acts to repeat
the right amount of existential crises from my brother Steve
the holiest of home made baked goods levitating in the street
the Steve-y cadence of losing control to access ways to see”

“I’m pretty sure I’m a kind of collection of things
scattered throughout the backyard
under the moon
pulling weirdo slow dance moves
maybe always losing it a little
I am ashamed to believe in myself!”

Young Jesus tell of a world where the capital-G God has been removed yet atheism remains a flimsy myth, its inhabitants left locked in a desperate search for something to believe in. Some manage to achieve a wide-eyed fanaticism in created powers, collapsing their existential worries into a bright white point, while others are doomed to shuffle around the fractured world, detached and ennui-filled, looking for themselves in fragments of televisual dreams.

Void as Lob is out today via the Young Jesus Bandcamp page, or on tape from Funeral Sounds. The band are about to head out on a pretty extensive tour (see below), sharing dates with Pope (marked with *) and Alaska (^), and will be bringing along a zine/experimental tape called Conceptual Beach in addition to the EP.

5/21 — Los Angeles @ The Smell
5/28 — San Diego @ Che Cafe
5/29 — Fullerton @ Intimate Warehouse
5/30 — Tucson @ Gary’s Place
5/31 — El Paso @ Boomtown
6/1 — Denton @ Rubber Gloves
6/2 — San Antonio @ Imagine Books and Records
6/3 — Austin @ Cheer Up Charlies
6/4 — Houston @ TBA
6/5 — Lafayette @ Wild Salmon *
6/6 — New Orleans @ Heavens Gate *
6/8 — Nashville @ Two Boots *
6/9 — Raleigh, NC @ Slim’s Downtown *
6/10 — Washington, DC @ Everglades *
6/11 — York, PA @ Skid Row Garage *
6/12 — Philadelphia, PA @ TBA *
6/13 — NYC @ Aviv w/ Very Fresh, Spit, Pope
6/14 — Providence, RI @ Aurora *
6/15 — NYC @ Silent Barn *
6/16 — Boston @ Ol Yeller *
6/18 — Columbus, OH @ Misfit Manor *
6/20 — Chicago @ Subterranean *
6/21 — Madison, WI @ Mickeys *
6/22 — Rock Island @ Rozz Tox *
6/23-25 — Yorkville, IL @ Summer Solstice Fest
6/26 — Kansas City @ House Show ^
6/27 — Denver @ Juice Church ^
6/28 — Albuquerque @ Dog House ^
6/30 — Las Vegas @ The Warehouse ^
6/01 — Los Angeles @ Roach Motel ^

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“Grow/Decompose… shares [David Foster] Wallace’s metamodern style – a postmodern web of motifs and strange humour countered with a modernist sincerity and genuine sense of hope …if played on repeat Grow / Decompose never ends, a musical ouroboros of well-worn paths that are both doomed and blessed and quite possibly all we have.”

We were lucky enough to get the opportunity to ask John and Eric from the band a few questions.

Jon: Thanks for speaking to us John. How is life in LA this time of year? Why did you decide to move from Chicago? 

Young Jesus: Life in LA is good. It’s certainly a strange place, easy to let it own you in a way, but also a highly motivating and inspiring place. There is a lot going on here that I really was not exposed to in Chicago. Chicago’s a wonderful place for me in many ways, but it became ‘home’ too much. I had an idea of what it was in my mind, so I wasn’t really open to a lot of the interesting things the city had to offer. It became a place where I drank a lot and played a lot of videogames. Both have their merits, but I personally needed to get out. It’s interesting that Home, to me, is a pretty straightforward record– almost journalistic. And I was hazy and drunk through a lot of it. Grow / Decompose is meandering, questioning, more subtle I hope. But I’ve never been more clear-headed. I guess the easier it is to think, the more questions come.

One thing I’ve noticed while reading up on Young Jesus is that no-one seems to agree as to who you sound like. I’ve seen Smashing Pumpkins, The Replacements, Staind, The National etc. etc., while I picked up some strong Hold Steady vibes, both in terms of your writing style and the dark-and-joyful sound. Do your listening habits reflect this wide(ish) range comparisons? Or are journalists and bloggers trying too hard to pin your sound? 

We listen to a lot of different things. From The Hold Steady and Pile to William Basinski and Stars of the Lid. It all plays a part in the thinking of a record. It might not be obvious while listening, but our musical influences affect things beyond melody/rhythm. Little eccentricities come out in strange ways. That’s what makes it interesting hopefully.

As a follow-on to that, how do you feel after releasing a new record to the world? Do you like that reviewers each come to their own conclusions? Or do you feel pretty certain of the narrative you’re trying to conjure? I was kind of guilty of bringing a lot of my own thoughts into my review of the album, and I guess I was conscious that perhaps that isn’t always a good thing for the artist? 

We have a narrative in our heads definitely. But a huge part of the narrative is that there is no absolute correct narrative. We’re glad to see people put their own interpretations on it cause that means they’re interacting with it. They’re having a similar process sorting through the album that we had sorting through life to create the album. I have a huge mental picture of records like Brand New’s Devil and God… or Weezer’s Pinkerton. And it’s probably so different from how they view it! That’s so great. That we ultimately have a point of intersection/relation and have– potentially– come to it from totally different places. Albums (as Roger Ebert said about movies) can be machines that generate empathy.

Grow / Decompose, just like your previous album Home, seems to focus on a defined set of themes and characters in a way that makes it not quite a traditional album but perhaps not quite a concept album. How do you feel about the term ‘concept album’ in relation to your releases? 

I became pretty engrossed in this album over the past year. It took over my life in a lot of ways. I gave myself to this record rather than to people, and at one point couldn’t really see a love that was there for me because I was so absorbed in the story/writing. I loved Neil, Milo, and May. So the concept is a strange reflection of life. Grounded in reality. Without a traditional arc because life doesn’t have that. Some things end, some don’t.

There is a decidedly novelistic feel about your writing. Would you say literature has an influence on your writing style? (If yes) Which authors would you say have had the biggest impact? 

I work in a bookstore and am reading more than I’m listening to music probably. Literature has had a major influence. The five main books are Hilda Hilst’s The Obscene Madam D, Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart, Mircea Cartrescu’s Blinding, Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor, and Suicide by Edouard Leve. And Muriel Spark. So six. These books very literally changed my life this past year. Oh and Jesse Jacobs By This Shall You Know Him.

Lispector/Cartrescu/Hilst showed me that it was okay (and beautiful) to think in absurd, non-normative logics. That you could create your own, and these logics are capable of carrying emotional/sentimental weight.

Reading Leve felt like breaking the law. It’s a work he turned in to his publisher and soon after killed himself. In fact, I could read it and feel safer. I do think it is a dangerous book, not for everyone, but for me it was a powerful life-affirming read. Almost named the record Les Atomes which is a band mentioned in one of Leve’s books (either Suicide or Autoportrait, I forget).

O’Connor and Spark deal with religion (specifically Christianity) in a rare way. They are ultimately believers, but are not afraid of examining the grotesque byproducts of belief. It’s easy to write off organized religion, maybe a bit harder then to look at it very honestly and specifically and turn the lens onto yourself as well. I’m an atheist, but some of my favorite thinkers (Spark, O’Connor, Jeff Mangum) are oddly Christian. Who knows what that means. Time to become a priest.

With its stories of addiction and general sadness shot through with a sense of hope, I compared Grow / Decompose to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Where do you stand on the whole irony vs. sincerity debate? Do you subscribe to the New Sincerity movement, or do you feel cynicism and darkness have role to play in the best, most enlightening/comforting art?   

I think you can confront darkness with sincerity and that the best stuff acknowledges the light that is in the dark and vice versa. We’re on board and interested with what New Sincerity could be about, and if people want to group us in with that, that’s okay. But we can also be sarcastic and ironic. So watch out.

You guys run the label Hellhole Supermarket that is putting out Grow / Decompose and take care of all of your own press and management. Is this sort of control important to you? I mean, I know there are some great labels out there, and some PR companies who make the effort to connect as human beings, but I can’t tell you how nice it is to get personal emails from acts about their new music. Does this increased involvement lead to a more rewarding process overall? Or is it an annoyance that gets in the way of music (or watching TV or whatever)?

I always tell Harrison, “if this label gets in the way of BBT (Big Bang Theory) one more time I’m gonna lose my smoothie.” I love those bang boys.

Finally, could you name 4-5 artists you are currently enjoying? They can be old or new, hidden gems or radio darlings, whatever you find yourself returning to at the moment.

Fragile Gang‘s For Esme, Pope, Mitski, Princess Reason, Earl Sweatshirt (‘solace’ is connecting a lot today).

Read our review of Grow / Decompose and then buy the album from Bandcamp or Hellhole Supermarket.

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Nearly three years after Home (a stint in which some of the band played as Bummer), Young Jesus announced a new album and unveiled a brand new single, ‘G’, a song which prompted us to say:

“I don’t want to write too much based on one single, but this seems to be going a step further than your standard indie-rock fare”

As hinted above, we were predisposed to hold this opinion. Home left us with some pretty high expectations for the band, in particular their writing and lead John Rossiter’s delivery. ‘G’ and the album trailer (see below) merely confirmed our suspicions. After spending some time with the full-length, it’s safe to safe that these feelings were justified.

Just as with Home, Grow / Decompose is not a traditional eleven-songs-with-three-singles record, but neither is it a full concept album. It’s something between the two, pinned together by a set of central themes and characters whilst escaping the pitfalls and constraints of a “concept album”. For this reason the album is reminiscent of Craig Finn’s writing, which to me is high praise indeed. The word ‘novelistic’ would come close if only Grow / Decompose didn’t bring to mind the very novels which play with the conventions of the form. Our preview mentioned David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest as a comparison and this seems to reach far further than the shared transvestic tendencies (of G / D’s Neil and IJ’s Tony Krause) cited as reasoning. Not only does the album have the same broad, scattered and vaguely cyclical structure as the novel, but Young Jesus’ music also shares Wallace’s metamodern style – a postmodern web of motifs and strange humour countered with a modernist sincerity and genuine sense of hope.

It’s not only in structure that Grow / Decompose brings to mind Infinite Jest. Their juxtaposition of bleak mental turmoil with buoyant (or at least fervent) emotion and hope is integral to the Young Jesus aesthetic. Again a parallel to The Hold Steady’s style, this combination provides a sense of depth that would be absent from something aligned purely to misery or joy. This makes the album, at least to my ears, very much a product of the twenty-first century. We aren’t always sad, or always happy, or always good or evil or apathetic or nihilistic or idealistic to the point of stupidity. We are all of these things and none of them and it can be hard work trying to fathom how to retain a sense of self while being in such a state of confusion. What I’m getting at is, like Infinite Jest, Grow / Decompose resists the temptation of satire and cynicism to paint real people stuck in this madness.

As the title describes so neatly, Grow / Decompose speaks of the familiar paths that human lives follow. Despite all the strangeness, the characters here are going through the age-old problems – depression, anxiety, identity crises, existential terror – the problems of being You and You alone, Molina’s “curse of a human’s life”. For all of the complexity of our existence, we are still locked in the atavistic pattern of life and death, everyone more or less condemned to the same mistakes and fears and joys that we as human beings have been experiencing for generations (“You don’t start clean,” tells the refrain of ‘Brothers’, “spines are twisting in the rings. This old tree, been around before you were born”). In this way the album is both pessimistic and hopeful, a statement that we seem unable to change for the better and a reminder that we are united by this monumental whammy. As Rossiter sings on ‘Oranges’: “She’s a believer in the relief / that we’re all receivers of suffering”.

Degeneration is a major theme and the whole record is imbued with an odd pleasure/pain relationship, accentuated with grotesque imagery. Take for example opener ‘EMP’: “So go ahead and search your chest, the slugs and inchworms know it best.” This brought to mind the book Threats by Amelia Gray, in which a man named David descends the spirals of grief after losing his wife. With death and decay quite literally pervading his house and life, David finds himself both terrified by his situation yet drawn towards some obscure peace with it, as if giving in to a dark and fungal siren. The characters on Grow / Decompose are similarly troubled and lonely, be they confused and unhappy with their identity (‘G’), saddled with unwanted children and gripped by overwhelming numbness (‘Oranges’) or using drugs and forming half-imagined relationships with television presenters (‘Slug’ and ‘Brothers’). Dissociated from others, they achieve the sort of heightened peculiarity of southern gothic hermits, existing within the confines of their own logic and physics, a world where the hope or possibility of connection or meaning flutters along rarely, staccato and unannounced.

The result is a manic-depressive relationship with their irregularity. On ‘Blood and Guts’ the character holds his weirdness aloft like a banner intended to confirm himself or terrify others, marching towards epiphany or entropy like Gray’s David. The title character in ‘Milo’, who sits somewhere near McCarthy’s Lester Ballard on the scale of Southern Gothic hermits, continues the perverse pleasure with the clear-eyed conviction of a serial killer, delighted by the gory truths of life and death. Milo is the depraved character, one who seems to have pushed past anxiety and apathy to realise his potential as a monster (“He paints his face and feels a brightness / glowing brighter inside / the cave he built out of the thorax / of the organist’s hide”). With his humanity stripped away he becomes a prophet who “sings the world as it’s shown”, the cyclical, elemental theme returning with its closing chant:

“All the birds singing
all the plants growing
all the wind blowing
all the bugs crawling
all the birds breaking
all the plants dying
all the wind crawling
and the blood flowing
and the waves breaking
with the birds singing
and the plants speaking
to the wind dying”

It seems important that the end of the final track ‘Dirt’ shares the same chords and drone as the opener, so that the end loops back to the beginning (another similarity to Infinite Jest). If played on repeat Grow / Decompose never ends, a musical ouroboros of well-worn paths that are both doomed and blessed and quite possibly all we have.

Grow / Decompose is out on the 13^th May via Hellhole Supermarket and you can pre-order buy it now on CD and cassette, or on vinyl via Gigantic Noise.

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It’s not an easy sound to describe, straddling the line between experimental electronics and sharp, shuffling indie rock. It’s focused and precise but also has this languid air, which is going to sound great when the sun is blazing down later in the summer. Whatever it sounds like, I like it a lot, and can’t wait to see what Diveliner does next.

You can download the single via the Diveliner Bandcamp page.

P.S. Check out previous tracks ‘Vida’ and ‘Electric Woman’ over on Soundcloud.

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