Heart of the Whale
Heart of the Whale
Independent Release, 2015
From San Francisco comes Heart of the Whale with this eponymous release. Dark and unsettling, like the person you can’t get off your mind, no matter how hard you try, HOTW, create an ominous sound scape as they relate songs of Image may be NSFW.
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hope and loss.
“Tell the Devil” gives us foggy atmospherics, and a quietly busy foundation for this impending showdown between good and evil. Too dark to be truly psychedelic, there’s an enticing, hazy quality to it.“Gold” pushes and pulls against itself. With a low-gear grind, the narrator is ardent about how, “There’s Gold in them there hills.” A man obsessed with the unobtainable, he is finally resigned to a life of want, “Under a stone you cannot roll/Beneath the leaves of the trees/The ghost, the dark and the breeze/I hear it calling me.”
On “Sleeping When” the guitars scratch deep, rough angular slices against the rhythm, trying to find their way out. “Cloud Fight” is animated and more forceful in its delivery. This is a great example of how the band puts it’s two guitars to maximum effect.
Exploring the darker side of their psyche without going all doomy-metal (it’s been done to death everybody, please take note), Heart of the Whale vacillate between stark, tension filled and visceral indie rock. Lou Reed and Sonic Youth’s overblown guitar freak-outs are obliquely referenced with thankfully brief squalls of art house noise. The band is focused on creating an atmosphere, not unlike a psychological horror film where the protagonist is at odds with himself.
There’s a captivating restlessness at center of this album which deserves to be explored.
www.heartofthewhale.com
