Based out of a similar neck of the Pacific Northwest’s woods that brought us Twin Peaks, Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy and Mandy by Panos Cosmatos, Earth Ball navigate the lure of nature with a weird bit between their teeth. Less in that saturated, folk horror, zeitgeist-y way, more like they’ve been left to their own devices and have been experimenting without any overarching fear of judgement. They trust in their own intuitions, no matter how wild. These dialled-in instincts were showcased spectacularly on the double live album they released earlier this year.
Their studio follow-up, Outside Over There, doesn’t let the baton drop. Fourth track ‘Seeing Doors Unlock’ is all paranoid, paranormal concerns with multi-instrumentalist, Jeremy Van Wych, clinking, rummaging and rattling about. It’s part cutlery drawer investigation, part wonky-wheeled stretcher race with their bass-wielding vocalist, Isobel Ford, reciting the track title over Liam Murphy’s meandering saxophone as the dedicated drum drive of John Brennan is routinely punctuated by Kellen Maclaughlin’s softly fretted notes.
There’s a weary, lolloping pulse to ‘Behind The Mall’. Its descending bass tones seem to whisper conspiratorially as it emerges through a fading fog. And before that, on ‘Where I Come From’, Ford incants and enchants in apparent glossolalia amongst solidly smacked drums and surging horns. The sax squeals rip and roar like they’re summoning a squall as it steadily builds into a frantic tempo of quickening toms, sharp shredding and brassy outbursts. You’ll find Sonic Youth, The Dead C, Sunburnt Hand of the Man and fellow Pacific Northwesters, Sumac, hanging out in this wheelhouse.
Fuzz-burnt amplifiers, distorted vocals, and jangling wind chimes announce the title track’s arrival. It’s like watching a giallo film on a big, old television as it carves out a slow-motion, airborne arc having been thrown across a room and through a second-floor window, shattering glass and splintering wood during its plummet towards the mossy ground outside. Nightmarish images of severed eyelids appear before the screen cartwheels into the earth with a sudden, sound-sucking whump. The quiet left behind is slowly filled with twisted guitars buzzing through mountains of gain.
The album opens with a sample of Stewart Lee threading a joke about Magners Pear Cider into his diverticulitis diagnosis. Considering Earth Ball’s penchant for free-roaming instrumentals that don’t so much expand upon the main theme as plunder its village and torch all the domiciles, it’s fitting to kick things off with a comedian who has claimed that he brings elements of free jazz into his comedy. The untethered brass squawks that make up ‘100%’ provide a brain-scudding platform from which Earth Ball then launch the raggedy blend of propulsive rhythms, hysterical skronk, and fearful outsider psych that forms second track ‘Helsinki’. A song that comes lurching out of the woods like it’s either being stalked or doing the stalking.
Beginning with a saxophone freak out and getting only madder from there, the twelve-minute finale, ‘And Music Shall Untune The Sky’ is where all hell truly shrieks loose. It’s a whirling dervish trapped in a plate glass window shop. Thunderous bass and drums race for the nearest exit whilst Van Wych hollers and wails in a fashion that makes exploded doors seem less unhinged. The band sound as if they’re tunnelling against time. Tearing through walls of ancient stone, chased by the fiery liquid of the planet’s collapsing core. They have become the pressurised sphere holding the earth together. Their heavy blend of burning low-end, panicked beats, and sparking guitars providing the requisite mass and gravitational pull to stop this Earth Ball from breaking apart, continents from cracking and tipping into parting oceans, mountains from piercing through lakes, the belt of the equator from expanding and entire countries splitting off and spiralling away into the great, cold chasm of space.
