Review Summary: making standards, faking answers
Inertia is poison. This one's for the gloomy souls resigned to telling themselves that they could be doing so much better, yet also so much worse – maybe you ask yourself which of the two matters more, maybe you trick yourself into thinking it's a privilege not to
have to answer that question right away. This is sticking plaster-level self-care at best, and otherwise a cheap ticket to depression, but as for its representation in art… Well, we all know how empowering it can be to see these kinds of elusive intangibles brought into shape by aesthetics and narrative.
The Exit Bags are amply equipped with traps and snares to this end. They squat under the same tarpaulins as Drowse, both of them nuclear children of Have A Nice Life's holocaustic wasteland, yet also similar in their methods for sprucing up desolate slowcore songwriting with blankets of shoegaze and piercing noise. The Bags' latest record
Our Sun Will Clean its Holy Wounds fares well as such in its aesthetics and composition – "Cat Wand Mastery" is a particularly pleasing balance of harsh and soothing tones in service to one central idea, while the comparatively demure "Neglect" polarises its extremes to great effect – but the sell here lies in the distinction the album draws between comfort and consolation music. Feel better about feeling better, or feel better about feeling worse? The latter camp has the edge here – this record plays like solace in the grips of lurking anxiety, billed as an 'increasingly unreliable narrator' coming to terms with their own age and powerlessness: self-love in the frame of an eroding self, stray thoughts of a slow decline stuck in the tar of present ennui.
One
almost hears this as traditional pleasure at various points. Take the opener "Vanishing Cloud Burial", the twinkling guitar motif of which struck me as a twee American Football-ism on first (unfocused) listen, though there's more subtlety there, less sentimentalist insistence, more transparent brittleness. On the other hand, the crackling distortion that floods through as the song culminates [/disintegrates?] is a hair's breadth from the kind of fuzz I would readily unwind to (Astrobrite, Medicine, Bowery Electric). It's among the album's strengths that it allows itself to be approached as the same kind of sheltering dissociation trip.
Dig, however, into the Exit Bags' industrial clatter and wilfully muted distant-stormcloud vocals, and you'll find a thread of anguish that runs along its contours soft or jagged, dips and weaves through its austere lyricism, and ties together the altogether clear impression that this is something of a cathartic record - and not in the sense of dinky emotional resolution. This record wrestles with an evasive sense of gnawing unease, as per "An Injured Deer's Final Moments"'s eruption into unequivocal violence (imagined or otherwise), and this is particularly evident in the lyrics. These are a dour affair throughout, whether morbidly grateful (
there’s no one to right the wrong that i’ve done but you don’t buy it / and i don’t deserve you), morbidly resolute (
i will try to find the infected wound / that makes the choice mine), or morbidly morbid (
my neck and stomach / then skinned alive / the harbinger of death bags me up). One reads the room.
It's less crass in practice, though, and much of the album's value lies in its suggestive capacity, be it the muffled vocal stylings – wordless if you like, poetic if you prefer – and the opacity of its bleary aesthetics. For me, the most evocative track here is "Missile Gap Year", superficially one of the less inviting cuts thanks to its droning bass rattle and pounding percussion. It should feel oppressive - it does in many respects - and it's probably the only track guilty of 'meandering' if that lens needs to be levelled. However, there's something organic at play here that goes well beyond the songwriting rulebook: it's the hardest track to second-guess and I find something disarmingly soothing in its confidence to wax and wane in time with its own pulse. What anyone else might hear in it is beyond my conjecture. Perhaps a better representation of the album's relatively linear playbook comes in the coursing noise and fuzz of "The Cost of Living"'s outro, which can be taken as a snapshot of ailing mental health or lapsing cognitive dexterity
if you want it to be, or else as a legitimately slick meltdown of the track's earlier tranquillity, if you're just along for the ride. The build signals that something is lost either way, but it says far more through leaving the question of
what up for grabs than in Making A Point as such.
Where does that leave the humble, fragile listener? Do I want to be comforted-sheltered-indulged, or to expose myself to the album's troubled undertones, to share its reach for a release that seems anything but forthcoming? It's hard to say outright, especially given that the Exit Bags' torpid haze somehow renders indecision a gratifying choice of its own. I can make peace with that, and I'd wager most listeners-in-waiting might too.
Our Sun Will Clean its Holy Wounds is a surprisingly accessible record either way, in part for its streamlined songwriting, in part for its resplendent textures and emotional bedrock. There
is a real comfort in taking solace in your own weakness, and although this album never shies from the fear that accompanies this, its greater gesture is undoubtedly of affirmation. Greet it with trepidation and open arms.
