haunting/haunted
Ioanna Gika recently put out an album that reminded me a bit of Pain is Beauty-era Chelsea Wolfe, early ‘00s Radiohead, and White Chalk-era PJ Harvey. She’s also touring with Garbage currently, which works nicely as a bill, though musically they’re not that similar. I put together this playlist to share the headspace I’ve got her slotted into.
Chelsea Wolfe comes to mind easily here; they’re on the same label, Sargent House (of which I have been a fan for a few years now and will probably do a newsletter about at some point), and have a similar aesthetic. (Also I just really like Chelsea Wolfe.) But in the playlist they ended up several songs apart, separated by harsher sounds. The songs before and after that stretch in the playlist are good (the theremin section in “Lovely Head” reminds me of the outro of “Out of Focus”, hence its position at the beginning, and we eventually get to PJ Harvey via Unwound), but I mostly want to talk about what’s in between. The harshness was a bit of an accident, though really, not surprising given my tastes. You see, I had the idea of following “Pyramid Song” by something from Giles Corey.
If you recognize the name Giles Corey but can’t think of what they sound like, it’s because it’s the name of a man who was killed during the Salem Witch Trials. He was pressed to death beneath stones, his last words being simply “More weight.” This was metal enough to be the name of a Helms Alee song, but I think most people (including me) came across it in The Crucible, or maybe even Drunk History. Giles Corey the band is really a side project of Dan Barret, the lead singer of Have a Nice Life, which he seems to have been pretty depressed for. On one song he sings I wanna feel like I feel when I’m asleep, but on this one the depression manifests as a small meltdown in the closing minutes.
The gothic lo-fi sound of Giles Corey brought to mind another artist I just started listening to, though her album came out a couple years back. Lingua Ignota sings brimstone hymns, this one accompanied by organ and piano pushed far into the red, distorting as though containing vast but corrosive infernal energies. It’s the sound of a fearsome god; it’s demanding. Think Diamanda Galás collaborating with Sunn O))). The fury is exhilarating but unsustainable, at least in this playlist, so we move on.
To Kill a Petty Bourgeoisie and Xiu Xiu bring us back down a little bit, though they both have their own barbs. TKAPB makes me think of post-industrial landscapes at night in the rain viewed through a car window, everything lit with bright yellow lights and thrumming along even though there are no humans visible. That probably doesn’t help you figure out what they sound like though. It’s bursts of static, swells of ambient noise, electronic sounds like hospital monitors, and a high voice echoing until indistinct. Xiu Xiu is noise pop for depressives (they have an album called Dear God, I Hate Myself) and seem of a feather with Giles Corey. They’re popular enough, you’ve probably heard of them.
In the end, I realized that “The Haunting Presence” as a title captured something about the sound of the playlist, but wasn’t quite the whole story. If something is haunting, then someone must be haunted.
Track listing:
“Lovely Head”, Goldfrapp, Felt Mountain
“Out of Focus”, Ioanna Gika, Thalassa
“Pyramid Song”, Radiohead, Amnesiac
“The Haunting Presence”, Giles Corey, Giles Corey
“For I Am the Light (and Mine is the Only Way)”, Lingua Ignota, All Bitches Die
“The Patron”, To Kill a Petty Bourgeoisie, The Patron
“Apistat Commander”, Xiu Xiu, A Promise
“Kings”, Chelsea Wolfe, Pain is Beauty
“October All Over”, Unwound, Leaves Turn Inside You
“The Piano”, PJ Harvey, White Chalk