In life and art, strong emotional reactions and restraint are frequently placed at odds with one another. A decade that has felt unmoored at best and marked by upheaval – dotted with climate events that have wrought havoc on different locales and been quickly forgotten – has inspired plenty of bold artistic responses. For Maria BC, an artist whose work has covered dark folk and goth territory and who has explored the potential of different electronic elements, the impulse to respond to these environmental pressures by being louder, denser, more aggressive would seem natural. However, on their third album, Marathon, they have instead pulled back sharply on the production, and these decisions build a low-simmering, tense mood in a gentle guise.
There is a desperation that runs throughout Marathon that is as subtle as the album’s arrangements. The stresses and horrors of recent years have worn away at anyone endeavouring to continue engaging with current events, but this is likely compounded if, like Maria BC, you live in a country where civil liberties and environmental protections are actively being dismantled. It could certainly be a motivating factor for artists, but it doesn’t have to be as simplistic as “hard times are good for punk rock”, and Maria BC shows that a soft-spoken approach still effectively exorcises those emotions.
Despite this unease, there is a meditative quality to the songs on Marathon. The slow, repetitive guitars that define the album are given a lot of breathing room, which, combined with Maria BC’s soft vocals, creates a lulling sensation. The repetition keeps the songs contained, the progressions detectable only through close listening. It’s consistent with the nervousness of the lyrics: the overwhelm from destruction, environmental or otherwise, that inadvertently becomes an acceptance when awareness and individual effort don’t feel like enough.
The title track opens the album with a sinister rumble of staticky guitars that swallow Maria BC’s voice. It seems like the natural progression from their previous album, Spike Field, but while the hazy style flows through much of Marathon, the thudding final notes of the title track are not in keeping with the fragility of the songs that follow.
The overall production of Marathon is much more muted than 2023’s Spike Field; though many of the same elements are there, the world of Marathon is all around fuzzier. Most strikingly, Maria BC’s voice is frequently obfuscated throughout Marathon, underplaying the highest notes and any potential drama, a technique more commonly associated with louder genres of music. But what it does do effectively is create a sense of urgency and desperation, as if Maria BC is relaying information the listener shouldn’t be privy to.
Their voice is barely audible on ‘Sabotage’, a song with slow, spacious undulations that are difficult to hide behind. Perhaps it’s because it’s one of the few songs that’s meant to be be soothing – a lullaby for a bout of insomnia – that Maria BC recedes as far as they can, as if they were trying to avoid disturbing you as you finally fall asleep.
But just as easily as this singing style can be used to calm, it can be used as a warning. The whispery vocals of ‘Safety’ are part of a subsumed tension created by a shimmery guitar and a screech of strings. It’s on this song that their backing vocals hit heights that illustrate that the reserved approach is a choice, that they want either your fixed attention or not to be heard at all.
Marathon as a whole has a very textural composition, and the arrangements often feel like they’ve been sliced into layers and compressed together. The sparse, guitar-led songs create the false impression of simplicity, but really the guitar is more like a protruding skeleton. The blurring of different instruments into different tones and timbres gives the impression of only that clearly defined frame, but you have to peel through the layers of pattering drums, dampened piano, or gauzy synths to get to the bones.
Percussive tones are also a recurring element, particularly in a clash of guitar and piano. The resonant piano on ‘As the earth turns’ takes on a harsh metallic quality when it meets the guitar on the chorus, whereas on ‘Rare’ that combination rings like a bell. ‘Rare’ has a spaciousness that allows clattering percussion and squelches of guitar to sink into the layers of the song. Maria BC’s voice hits higher, stronger notes here, but is stubbed out like a cigarette with a bit of pointed distortion.
Amid the evenly paced, downtempo songs are interludes that sound intentionally programmed. ‘Port authority’ and ‘Channels’ are two vibrantly-coloured, frenetic electronic tracks with big ricocheting rhythms that show the extremes that accents elsewhere on the album could be pushed to. ‘Port authority’ is filled with electronic splashing sounds and a vibrato that makes your ears feel full when you listen on headphones. They are a concentration of intensity on the album (where ‘intensity’ is the same as BPM), and yet the percussive sounds of ‘Port authority’ seep into the following track ‘The sound’, which has the album’s characteristic understatement. Some of the most potentially overwhelming instrumentation in an arrangement is instead shockingly subtle: the sub-bass is a low swell in the foundation of the song, a distorted sheet of guitar that washes through on the chorus is easy to miss, the percussion is more of an accent than a means to keep time. It is a nuanced texture floating beneath minimalist guitar and a prominent showing of Maria BC’s soprano and a clear message: ‘you’re searching in vain.’
What you’ll find in Marathon is entirely dependent on how closely you’re willing to listen. The folk guitar rhythms and stray words are easy to catch, and that surface level listen is pleasant enough. But the immediate impression of gentleness is something of a bait and switch. Maria BC calls for you to be on your toes so that you are not caught off guard when the message finally breaks through.
