Husband-and-wife duo Shrine Maiden deal in heavy music and heavy concepts. They are a group seemingly intent on weighing down your shoulders with immense waves of sound while taxing your grey matter mulling the works of art theorist Hubert Damisch and Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño.
Fuller and more rounded than their earlier work, A Theory of /Cloud/ sees previous rough edges worn smooth like pieces of glass washed ashore after years being buffeted by the tides. As a prima facie drone metal release, it’s heavy when it chooses to be – but always atypically so. The band play with form and function in a way that places them closer to experimental outliers like The Body and The Angelic Process rather than any of the many, many side-, solo- and vanity projects that mercifully collapsed during The Great Drone Metal CD-R Crash of the mid 2000s.
Rather than one-note amplifier worship, Rachel Nakawatase (voice, synths, drums) and Ryan Betschart (voice, guitar, bass) use slow-motion heaviness to explore the interrelated worlds of shoegaze, noise and ambience. These efforts are then framed by the unique and insular weirdness that comes of sharing the same space, sustenance and oxygen as someone important to you: a microcosmic existence that influences everything from creativity, perception and observation through to highly-coded in-jokes that are unreadable to anyone outside the closed loop.
Opening track ‘A Storm At Sea’ neatly sets the scene for what is to follow. In some ways it’s the closest thing you might get to ‘standard’ heaviness here, but at the same time it’s also resolutely atypical: Shr-iron Maiden this is not. Phosphorescent waves of sound push and tug while strangled black metal rasps narrate, both sides equally weighted and neither ceding to the other. The result is something that’s low-key bewildering: immersive yet unsettling, like a dream-pop Oranssi Pazuzu or a less scattered, more readily-digestible version of what Pyramids have been experimenting with over the years.
Spry, deceptively active drums usher in the album’s title track, which takes hold of the previous track’s dangling threads and stretches them to a point where they brings to mind both Kirby’s Dream Land being viciously stripmined for rare earth minerals and Girls Against Boys being forced to record their landmark House Of GVSB LP while slowly being dissolved in acid. Elsewhere, ‘And I Arise (Reprise)’ blends in some very weird melodies indeed. These aren’t just playfully off kilter: no, they in fact recall Burning Witch vocalist Edgy 59 doing his best Bilinda Butcher impersonation while attempting autoasphyxiation with a length of dirty rainbow. All of these are decidedly ugly notions, but they not only work but are as thoroughly, undeniably compelling as eating a full two-litre tub of ice cream just to see how gloriously shitty it’ll make you feel.
Away from the cloying and the tumultuous, tracks like ‘Ua ‘ike au’ and ‘Vog On The Water’ draw from Nakawatase’s Hawaiian heritage. Calmer, more meditative and featuring sung or chanted vocals, these moments allow room to breathe while revealing fresh new terrain. Both songs speak to a sense of joy, place and belonging, sentiments that are, more often than not, absent from the traditionally miserablist doom metal lexicon. This ensures the album’s psychic landscape is often as unfamiliar as the sonic, putting one in mind of the emotional and intellectual complexities present in the works of Divide & Dissolve or BIG | BRAVE.
If these detours feel entirely natural and unforced, others take time to fully bed in. The squelchified arpeggio that forms the backbone of ‘For Rachel’, for example, is uncomfortably knobbly at first pass, and when the crow-caw vocals come home to roost it’s hard to know whether the song is a paean to loss or a shrieked curse upon the poor girl’s name. ‘Little Stranger’, meanwhile, features glum mumbles that wouldn’t sound out of place intro-ing a 90s Paradise Lost music video and closing track ‘Dream Of Home’ is admittedly lovely but at the same time feels a touch on the nose, thanks to wind chime-esque drones and the soft, lulling sound of breaking waves. None of these are death crack moments by any means, but they nevertheless require a slow, steady wading-in, rather than the instant, ecstatic immersion offered elsewhere.
Doom has become an increasingly broad church over the past twenty-five years. Practitioners the world over splice the foundational low-and-slow aesthetic with everything from black metal and jazz to folk and power electronics. This is a good, possibly even heroic thing. With this latest album Shrine Maiden stake their own claim, further bastardising accepted forms while folding in hitherto untested notions, insights and experiences. Heady and absorbing, the album owes as much to the seasick thrum of artful, dry ice-swaddled genre mainstays Sunn O))) as The Cocteau Twins, Mazzy Star or Muscle And Marrow.
Central to Damisch’s theory of the ‘cloud’ is the idea that linear perspective fails to fully account for the full richness of visual experience. Shrine Maiden explore this terrain in a manner that’s inquisitive and occasionally playful but always extremely earnest. Beyond naming their album for one of Damisch’s works, Nakawatase and Betschart suggest they’ve gone deep in trying to port the thinker’s ruminations on visual art over to their own sonic practice. It’s a lofty goal and, from an outsider’s perspective, one that’s admittedly hard to parse in terms of success rate. Beyond the realms of theory and concept, however, A Theory of /Cloud/ is both a figurative and tangible triumph: dense, changeable, vaporous and easy to get lost within. It’s a piece of work that can fuel wispy, carefree musings one moment and prompt a brow-crunching migraine the next.
