When we last heard —__–___, they sounded like they’d exploded an angel. In just over two minutes, ‘From The Valley’, the closing track on their debut record The Heart Pumps Kool Aid crammed in celestial strings that sounded like they were falling down a Penrose staircase, wretches of guttural vocals, and a disarmingly heavenly autotuned croon. It was a knife-edge of bewildering juxtapositions that the whole album seemed to have been building towards.
For all of —__–___’s second album, Night of Fire the duo of More Eaze and composer, artist and Orange Milk co-owner Seth Graham are joined by recovery girl, aka galen tipton, who’d featured on The Heart Pumps Kool Aid’ s closer. They start from the same precipice struck on ‘From The Valley’, and stay teetering there. Pulling from extremes of near silence and cascading noise, tenderness and rage.
A shriek of violin begins the opening track. From there, More Eaze bows out a joyously dissonant run before snapping into something oddly ornate and melodic. All the while, screams and splutters weave a weird counter through the beauty unfolding. The following track begins with a blast of “you mother fucker” before a swell of held organ notes, violin and voice falls into one of the most gorgeous passages of music on the record. All the while contorted vocals continue providing intermittent punctuation. This tense catharsis mutates and leaks through the whole album, occasionally leaning more one way then the other, but never coming close to resolution. The sharp dynamics never feel bolted together, but in dialogue. A yin and yang in fraught equilibrium as the music swings from soaring heavenwards and spiraling crankily inwards.
More Eaze has spoken about Night of Fire being informed by living through systematic oppression and repression while in Texas (she’s since moved to New York), something she relates in greater detail in a recent interview for tQ. Yet —__–___ are mindful the darkness is never far from its antithesis, from “community, love and happiness”.
To be clear, Night of Fire is far more nuanced than a dark record with a happy ending. It stays in the turmoil. Light and dark, rage and serenity spun around and knotted together. It’s ferocious, gorgeous and a little surreal all at once. An album that growls and coos in equal measure but never seems contradictory. It might come from personal trauma, differing experiences from Graham and More Eaze of looking back at their troubled hometowns. But in the conflicting desires it captures: screaming at the world and trying to sing over it, scraping at the walls and searching for a harmonious salve, it latches into headspaces which are transferable and relatable. Hymning the troubled angels of our nature.
