Consuming the Tangible

There’s this dance I do when I’m enjoying myself at a live show. Doesn’t matter what the genre is; my body starts to rock back and forth, some old hippie dude hearing his own music. My eyes close, my head begins to sway, and it looks like I’m possessed by someone possessed with the stereotype of imitating Stevie Wonder. Again, doesn’t matter if it’s blues or black metal, that’s what my body does when it’s enjoying the music.

Not Here Not Gone, the latest from Portland, OR’s Blackwater Holylight, often feels like the musical equivalent of said dance. Not the music that inspired it; the heavy, lumbering sway of an awkward introvert in his 50s trying to remember what it was to have these feelings in his 20s.

I wish I could recall where I came across the band. I know I’ve had the debut for a while, if its placement in my Bandcamp collection is any indication. It’s not the where so much as the why though, and I imagine listening back I was looking for more of that doomy, Coven-inspired heavy rock. It’s there — but somehow I didn’t follow through with the band’s other releases until last year’s If You Only Knew EP. The riffs on “Wandering Lost” had me excited for whatever the future would bring.

To be clear, I’m still excited. Not Here Not Gone is a thick, heavy record; a deliberate feint from the heavier rock fare of the EP which, according to guitarist/vocalist Sunny Faris, didn’t really fit what they were going for. And what they’re going for is a very fuzzy, ’90s-inspired shoegaze that isn’t afraid to veer into another direction when it so chooses. And much as I enjoy the record, I wish it had zagged a little harder.

The opening track “How Will You Feel” serves as the mission statement for the album, a crushing pop confection that hints at the angst of an ending relationship that could be now, or could be 35 years earlier. It feels so much of a piece of my aural memory of college (class of ’95!) it’s astonishing. It follows with “Involuntary Haze,” which adds little variation to the theme but holds its own, the trials of the group relocating to Los Angeles from Portland and condensing down to a trio in every clipped signal coming through the viscous reverb to marry with Faris’s voice. “Bodies” alternates in woozy waves of intensity, but I’m left feeling by the time of “Heavy, Why?” a bit…dulled by it all.

Does that make sense? It’s a distortion thing — when the sound is at that pitch and hum it lulls me completely. It’s why I’ve taken to the recent sunn 0))) albums, but here it begins to distract. But really this is the time to wake up, and the end of “Heavy, Why?” senses it as well, because the closing stretch sharpens into focus, clearing the way for “Giraffe,” which at just over a minute doesn’t seem like it would make such an impact, but this interlude jars you with its different timbre, jolting you into a state of anticipation — one met in spades with, well…”Spades,” which remembers that the group can absolutely slay if they want to. Even better, the track acts like a palate cleanser, because suddenly songs like “Void to Be” and “Fade” move enough away to explore more open tonalities, making those distorted passages all the more effective.

By the conclusion of Not Here Not Gone any sequencing issues are minor at most; taken on their own each song is striking and evocative; the trio clearly grown in their sound, embracing their new environs and finding a supportive community to work within. I keep coming back to it despite the growing stack of unopened, un-listened to albums forming a prison I’ll happily never escape.