Review Summary: An effortlessly crafted storm of ugliness and anxiety, it's Marshall bringing the apocalypse to us.
Daughters pulled off a miracle.
You Won’t Get What You Want was a record that sounded refreshing and distinct from anything they had released prior, but became the stalwart example by which the band’s future would be compared to. It did so,
so many things right and introduced a wave of fresh ears to the group’s fascinatingly diverse catalog, despite being so different from the rest of it. So it makes a lot of sense that, when the band’s frontman Alexis Marshall announced solo material, there would be a lot of discussion on what kind of sound we’d be hearing from him after his band’s 2018 opus dropped. After all, “Nature in Three Movements”, a non-album single Marshall released in 2020, wasn’t a roaring punk swell, but a pounding industrial statement. It wasn’t anything like
You Won’t Get What You Want.
…or was it?
With each listen of Marshall’s solo LP,
House of Lull . House of When, it becomes clearer and clearer that this direction was hidden in plain sight. The noisy dissonance, the pulsing rhythms, even Marshall’s vocal style, it’s all visible in Daughters’ comeback album. In the full context of Marshall’s extensive musical history, this solo material is ruthless in its impenetrability, but somehow, the next logical step for a man whose body of work has grown in texture and style with each new release. The move from Daughters to this is a natural one; if
You Won’t Get What You Want was pushing the listener to the absolute edge,
House of Lull . House of When is the horrified gasp right before plummeting downward.
While the classic
Swans worship is difficult to overlook, Marshall fits in even more comfortably with the harsh, abrasive noise of fellow Rhode Island act
The Body, along with Daughters tourmate
Lingua Ignota (the latter contributing to Marshall’s LP). Dense and downright impenetrable by any other standards, Marshall’s transition toward this experimental sound is, in retrospect, expected. The lingering traces of accessibility that stood amongst
You Won’t Get What You Want’s punkier aspects are all but gone. In their place stand very disorienting compositions that could outclass even
Michael Gira himself in putting experimental, industrial anxiety to note. Marshall knows what he’s doing; he’s totally internalized his own brand of musical chaos, even when the aesthetics of his peers and influences aren’t entirely concealed.
But Marshall, as comfortably as he sits in this vibe, still manages to keep things diverse and interesting. The suffocating freakout of “It Just Doesn’t Feel Good Anymore” desperately demands to be performed live, with its squawking saxophone and staggering percussion, capped off with maddening vocal shouts and shrieks. It’s a feverish track whose abstract composition will likely be a love-it-or-hate-it moment for fans and newcomers alike, but with the pandemonium spiraling, it rarely meets a point of being out of his control. In total contrast, Marshall’s move from dazed shouting to hushed muttering in “Hounds in the Abyss” is even more terrifying than the entity “breathing on the other side of [his] bedroom door” that he’s referring to in the lyrics. It’s a droning, brooding single that wouldn’t feel out of place on any album released by The Body.
The track duo of “Youth as Religion .” and “Religion as Leader” parallel each other in surprising ways. The former has a simmering, almost intimate instrumentation, with Marshall cooling it with his wild wails and sticking to morose spoken word segments. Several of these lyrical passages are retold in the latter “Religion as Leader”, turning the intimacy on its head with harsh, angry shouts. These two tracks show two entirely different sides of Marshall’s musical palette, where he can infiltrate his own established ethos of industrial noise with eerie, subdued songs that are just as frightening and strange as the louder, more overt tracks. Even the opener “Drink from the Oceans . Nothing Can Harm You” manages to show his multi-faceted prowess throughout its singular length, going from low piano keys and sparse, ghostly effects to a loud exorcism of a swell, all across its 7-minute length. Marshall wastes no time in showing that, even in perpetual anxiety, there are layers and dynamics to that anxiety. We feel it in different ways and he wants to show all of them.
However, while
House of Lull . House of When keeps the listener in a frequent state of disorientation and panic, it doesn’t really stick its landing. Yes, “Night Coming” is a cooldown after the explosiveness of “They Can Lie There Forever”, but it retreads some familiar aesthetic ground and doesn’t surprise in the same way the other tracks do. It’s dark. It’s grim. But it doesn’t really paint the best picture as a final recollection of the total trip that the listener has experienced. For an album that takes such penchant in frightening the audience, “Night Coming” doesn’t really pull that off, and sours what could’ve been a prime way to send them off, pondering what the hell they just heard.
Despite gripping his own dismantled industrial artistry on
House of Lull . House of When, Alexis Marshall feels remarkably at home with it. The off-kilter rhythms that frequent tracks like “Open Mouth” and “No Truth in the Body” are rubble falling off a fractured structure, with the listener breathlessly anticipating the whole thing coming down in one mighty collapse. The jazzy madness of “It Just Doesn’t Feel Good Anymore”, the siren whines and desperate vocal cries of “They Can Lie Here Forever”, everything comes together into a package that matches its own insanity with a key ear for detail. It’s almost like Marshall’s world is coming to an end and he wants to share that apocalypse with us, from its loudest cataclysms to its most unsettling silences.
While it does have a bit of trouble keeping itself afloat by its end,
House of Lull . House of When is Marshall pushing himself closer and closer to a breaking point. But he does this with a cunning smirk on his face, dragging the listener down further and further with him, until only ugliness and anxiety remain. Considering how effortless he makes it look, we might as well join him. What a time to be alive…
