Deafheaven: "Sunbather"

The house mottoes of Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire make excellent micro-reviews: House Stark’s “Winter is coming,” for example, nicely sums up Agalloch’s Marrow of the Spirit and the Lannisters’ “Hear me roar” tells you what you need to know about what Caro Tanghe is doing on Oathbreaker’s Eros/Anteros. Deafheaven’s Sunbather, then, is House Waxley’s “Light in Darkness.”

The opposites of light and darkness immediately find an analogy in the contrast between the album’s decidedly “un-metal” artwork and the onslaught of blast beats and black metal screams that sets in 47 seconds into the first song. That Sunbather will polarize listeners probably fits this duality. There has been quite some hype about this album and I’m sure it will not only show up in a lot of best-of-the-year lists in December, but also in some most-overrated/overhyped lists. I’d put it in the first category, though. Sunbather is a genre bender between black metal, post-rock, and field recordings that mixes Wolves in the Throne Room, Envy, and Mogwai and that is as uplifting as it is devastating.

The discussions of genre and genre rules provoked by the album are not only intensified by interviews like this one, in which guitarist Kerry McCoy jokingly refers to themselves as “the Hugh Grant in Notting Hill of metal,” but also by the fact that singer George Clarke looks like Bayern Munich’s midfielder Toni Kroos: potential son-in-law rather than corpse paint. Now don’t let that fool you: there is not much playing nice in the lyrics or in the mood of Sunbather.  The guiding motif for the album is the image of a sunbathing girl in a wealthy suburb who triggers all kinds of dark, regretful, and destructive thoughts and emotions in the observer: “I watched you lay on a towel in grass that exceeded the height of your legs. I gazed into reflective light. I cried against an ocean of light.” The lyrics and their delivery as unintelligible shrieks are both gut-wrenching and very intense. That a sunbathing girl leads someone to recording these kinds of screams will probably be considered fucking insane by the majority of mainstream listeners, but it confronts us with the true amount of pain experienced by the narrator: “In the room full of family, but couldn’t find one. In the hallways lit up brightly, but couldn’t find myself. I laid drunk on the concrete on the day of your birth in celebration of all you were worth. I am my father’s son. I am no one. I cannot love. It’s in my blood,” Clarke screams in “The Pecan Tree” and I’m reminded of Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 movie Festen (The Celebration). Watch that movie, and you’ll look into a similar abyss.

The music is, non-surprisingly, also full of contrasts. Contemplative and quite beautiful instrumental passages collide with blast beats, tremolo picking, and shrieks that will make your hairs stand up. At times, this is absolutely exhilarating: what happens between minutes four and five in “Vertigo” may just be the best thing I’ve heard all year. The way it changes from solemn postrock into a Coheed-and-Cambria-style guitar solo only to lead into blast beats and black metal shrieking is nothing short of amazing. Once the drums shift down a gear, the song changes to a part where George Clarke’s wails sound like a demon trapped in your bathroom (a demon who’s been raising hell in there for hours and who’s getting a little exhausted now). The song ends with wall-of-sound guitars accompanied by Clarke’s screams – a combination that sounds like he is carrying the weight of the world. The pain and loneliness becomes almost palpable here. It’s super epic and done masterfully.

What I find most interesting about this is how it plays with our expectations and what it has to teach us about our preconceptions. It makes us take a step back and think about the connection between images and music. How the cover design, band photos, logo, etc. influence our reading or listening. Perhaps it even makes us question why we listen to certain kinds of music. By taking a genre that is very much determined by genre conventions – musically and image-wise – and dissolving it into something entirely different, Deafheaven is quite iconoclastic. Sunbather thus may remind us of the inherent contradiction of iconoclastic genres developing their own orthodoxy: when genres that oppose tradition (political, religious, musical, etc.) create their own rules and traditions that then have to be followed. Sunbather is music detached from ideology – and that’s pretty refreshing. It’s not often that albums like that come along.


Here's a video of the recording process.
Their Facebook page.
Deafheaven on Bandcamp.