ALBUM OF THE MONTH: Lonely People With Power
The best metal band in the world.
How do you write about your favorite band?
How you do you write about an important band?
How do you write about a band that has never fallen off?
Way back in 2014, I remember reading about Sunbather, Deafheaven’s seminal record. Already late to party (the record dropped mid-2013), I read that this hyped-up black metal album had a Milan Kundera spoken word sequence. For me, a baby twenty three year old boy who recently read The Unbearable Lightness of Being, this was like a dog whistle. I cued the record up. I was blown away. My entire teenage love of metal came rushing back to the forefront of my heart.
Fast forward back to today: I’ve now been making lists and reviewing albums for a long time. My taste and my gut feelings get me pretty far but writing about Deafheaven after years of intense fandom has made me think even deeper about what makes me recommend a record. After I ask myself the obvious questions (Am I ever bored? Do I keep returning to it? Does it make me feel something?), I end up at the thinking about novelty and craft.
Relentlessly creative, and more imp-ish than you’d expect, Deafheaven have kept their appetite for expansion throughout their 15 year career. Undoubtably, Deafheaven helped popularize a novel sound: a fusion of black metal and shoegaze that is now dubbed blackgaze. I have some other favorites in the genre, but none have as pristine a track record as Deafheaven. That can only be attributed to their dedication to crafting the best album they can time and time again.
I held painful hype during the lead-up to Lonely People With Power. In fact, I wept on the train just reading this review from the great Michael Nelson. This was before I even listened to the record, mind you!!!
Even still, I carefully tempered my expectations: while I wasn’t an Infinite Granite (their last album) hater, it certainly wasn’t my cup of tea. Coupled with the fact that my favorite album of theirs (Ordinary Corrupt Human Love) directly preceded IG, I was ready to let my love of Deafheaven wane if they were done with the harsher side of their artistry. Artists should evolve! I would be okay!
What makes you enjoy an album?
How do you identify a great album?
How do you identify a masterpiece?
It’s funny that, with all my hand wringing about what this album will or won’t sound like, Lonely People With Power plays like a greatest hits album*.
The first five songs of LPWP are practically a one for one album sampler:
‘Doberman’ is Sunbather (and Roads to Judah… the albums share more DNA than people like to give credit)
‘Magnolia’ is New Bermuda
‘The Garden Route’ is Ordinary Corrupt Human Love
‘Heathen’ is Infinite Granite
And, finally, ‘Amethyst’ begins to show what Lonely People With Power is all about.
My favorite Deafheaven songs are the ones that sound like they make the sky bend to their will. A close second is when they sound like a tsunami and vocalist George Clarke is somehow perfectly riding every wave. And my third is everything else.
A lot of the songs on this record have those elemental qualities, but there are new shades to their music as well: it’s the first time Deafheaven have sounded cooler and more fun than they have emotional. Now, as a self proclaimed emo-freak, I sometimes miss the melancholy, the descents into despair that went so deep they actually pierced rock bottom and found light on the other side.
That said- the new stuff is working for me. There is an apocalyptic quality to LPWP; it feels isolated and hermetic. The distance and remove that gives this record its character actually makes it more listenable.
Ultimately, the record feels like a road trip: living up to that ‘lonely’ in the title, the songs evoke a lengthy, solitudinous drive through urban wastelands, ramshackle buildings the only company to find.
Ironically, then, an early surprise is ‘The Garden Route’, Deafheaven’s version of a love song.
*Sidebar: Do you realize how fucking good of a band you have to be to have a first half of a new album sound like a greatest hits album???! When it’s all new material???
Let’s get some hyperbole out of the way: Kerry McCoy is a genius guitar player. He is a master of texture and emotional evocation, operating his guitar more like a paint brush, yet he can still melt faces with his shredding when he deems fit. ‘The Garden Route’ operates mostly in that textural, post-rock world. The verses are spacious and meditative, the bass line as limber as anything they’ve done, and the lyrics culminate in conjuring a westward escape with a lover:
“From all my truth/
Away with you/
West/
From all my truth/
Away with you”
Not for nothing, I sent it to one of my music brain trust and got this response:
While a typical quiet-loud quiet-LOUD dynamic still gives the song a lot of juice early on, ‘The Garden Route’ never reaches a true moment of catharsis of which Deafheaven are so masterful. The song just keeps building and sprawling and moving forward, driving along the garden route.
Let’s talk ‘Body Behavior’. At this point in the drive, darkness has fully taken hold: the song opens on a father showing his son naked women to discern his ‘type’ and we follow the narrator until his disillusionment fully takes hold.
Adding yet another vocal variation to his repertoire, Clarke uses more of a punk bark at the top of the song. Though more human and clear, he actually sounds more pained than when he uses his trademark fry screaming.
My favorite stretch of this song comes about two and a half minutes in. The song, up to this point claustrophobic and tense, dramatically opens up for some breathing room right until my favorite breakdown on the record.
Clarke then howls, full releasing into nihilism:
“No, I don't feel anymore/
Nowhere is guidance when everything's wrong/
No, I don't feel anymore/
Nowhere is guidance when everything's wrong/
No, I don't feel anymore”
This is Deafheaven in their shit: turning life’s ugliest and bleakest moments into something breathtaking, something that is meant to unify rather than isolate. It’s a magic trick they continue to pull off with equal parts panache and pathos.
I’ve written about a song from the first two sections of the album so why not complete the hat trick and finish with a song from the third section.
If you spend anytime talking to people or reading about this album, you’re gonna hear about ‘Winona’. And for good reason: it’s a perfect Deafheaven song: it has their pummeling wall of sound, stunning middle passages, and opens with the chanting of a ten person chorus. It’s amazing! But for five albums now, Deafheaven’s album closers have been stellar and LPWP is no different.
‘The Marvelous Orange Tree’ opens with that apocalypse guitar feedback that is so crucial to this record. Actually, I’m wrong: it opens with the sound of water.
Remember when I said some of my favorite Deafheaven songs were the ones where Clarke sounds like he is riding a tidal wave? Here, the water crashes over him, the gentle lapping that begins the song gives way to monumental waves that threaten to drown the band.
But they don’t.
What seems like drowning is actually a baptism; the song ends with the band fully embracing the darkness that has plagued them for the entire album:
“With my endless illness/
Walking into blackness/
With my endless illness/
Walking into blackness”
They’ve finally accepted their flaws within and now are able to walk side by side with the pain that has tormented them for so long. It’s an affirming, surprising, triumphant note to end the record.
Does this review need to be different?
How can I get my readers to give this record a chance?
What do I actually think about LPWP?
Similarly, we have now reached the end. I’ve broken my rule and talked about three songs, I did this weird question thing as a framing device, and I’m posting this on a Wednesday for goodness sake.
Is this Deafheaven’s best album? I don’t know. Do I think it’s the album that could get people to love them as much as I do? Yes. LPWP is a crystallization of everything Deafheaven has to offer and it’s a remarkably accessible entry point for new fans.
I’m gonna bring it back to Kundera for a moment: I read a quote of his earlier this year in George Saunders’ fantastic book on writing, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. I’ll paraphrase, but essentially Kundera talks about not putting much stock in authors who are smarter than their books. He talks about how the best writers listen the wisdom of the book they are writing, letting a higher power guide their hand.
I visited San Francisco for the first time this past weekend. It’s hard to ignore the wealth disparity and the dichotomy of ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ that has long been fuel for Deafheaven’s songwriting; Sunbather was inspired by Clarke looking at a woman sunbathing in an expensive neighborhood in San Francisco. Clarke (and McCoy) were filled with envy and pain and wrote a masterpiece.
I don’t quite know if existential suffering has been the higher power guiding Deafheaven’s hand all these years but they have yet to release something that didn’t send shockwaves through me. They might be the best dudes in the world but I don’t think meeting them will ever be more powerful than their records (said praisingly). And I don’t need to meet them! I only need them to keep loving the music they make as much as I do and everything is going to be just fine. Clearly, they have been able to channel that despair and wisdom into something that resonates for me.
And yet, this record marks a new era. Lonely People With Power is a sage-like look in the rearview mirror (more driving imagery!!!) and realizing that the pain may never fully subside, so we must find other ways to carry on. Fifteen years into their craft and Deafheaven are more powerful than ever and are anything but lonely. They have their pain, they have each other, they have me, and maybe, after all of this rambling, they’ll have you.
Thanks so much for reading, below are some ways you can help and support me if you feel inclined!
Have thoughts? Let me know in the comments!
ok you got me
I'd like to hear some of this album when we see you next month 🖤🎸