Slowness - Berths (2019)

The San Francisco snorecore trio’s third album continues their droney shoegaze ethic, with melancholic, phased guitars a la Spacemen 3 and The Cure in evidence on opener, ‘The Fall’, which could easily have sat on Disintegration. Early single ‘Rose’ adds a downer Neil Young vibe, ca. On The Beach supplemented with lava-flow melody lines and sleepy vocal harmonies from founding members Julie Lynn and Geoffrey Scott that suggest a touch of The Charlatans in the mix. Scott’s guitar pyrotechnics propel the track’s circuitous navigation through your grey matter, passing signposts for Red House Painters, Luna, and Spiritualized along the trip.

Side One ends with the album's follow-up single, the mostly instrumental ‘Berlin’, another nod towards the Cure’s suicide trilogies (Seventeen Seconds / Faith / Pornography and Wish / Disintegration / Bloodflowers). Flip the record over and your met with the horrorshow shitstorm of ‘Breathe’, a repressive exercise of gothic-tinged angst that will surely please fans of Swans, Coil, and Nurse With Wound.

‘Sand & Stone’ is a kinder, gentler dream pop extravaganza, while closer ‘Asunder’ has an almost liturgical groove typically reserved for monastic chanting services. The repetitive chorus hypnotizes as it draws you into the drama of Lynn and Scott and drummer Christy Davis’ disintegrating relationships ‘torn asunder’. This was one of the reasons the band states it took nearly five years to produce their follow-up to How To Keep From Falling Off A Mountain. But the music lives on, even if personal couplings fall by the wayside, and for that, we can all be thankful for one of the year’s finest releases.