Even after a long career making creeping heavy music in projects like Bone Awl and He Who Crushes Teeth, the music that Marco del Rio has made over the past decade as Raspberry Bulbs is uniquely unsettling. First on his own and then with a shifting cast of collaborators, he’s mined the most curdled corners of punk and metal to make both tortured no-fi efforts and more recent full-band recordings that feel cosmically off-balance. His songs are full of riffs that become more nauseating the longer you listen to them. At their best, the songs are autostereograms in reverse: They start out looking like something you’ve encountered before, then dissolve into unparsable, overwhelming noise.
Before the Age of Mirrors is the first Raspberry Bulbs full-length since 2014, but it picks up these threads right where the last, Privacy, left off. Across eight proper tracks and four shorter interludes, del Rio and his band—guitarist Nick Forte and drummer Jim Ning Nong—lead listeners to a world of sharp edges, sudden pitfalls, and hidden dangers. As devotees of raw punk and deathrock, they sometimes channel those familiar shuddering sounds, but there’s something even more sinister in pieces like “They’re After Me,” a burst of paranoid desperation scoured by feedback. As ever, del Rio tops the track with his distinctive vocals—which, scraped by distortion and noise, are the sort of sounds you might hear echoing from behind a dumpster in a David Lynch film. It all sounds wrong, in the most menacing possible way.
Because of del Rio’s caustic bark and the general haze of Raspberry Bulbs’ self-engineered recordings, their lyrics have traditionally been tough to decipher. The specifics still sometimes get garbled in the fuzz, but on Before the Age of Mirrors, you can make out a little more about the otherworldly spaces these songs explore. Del Rio’s characters are overwhelmed and at the brink, doing whatever they can to outrun the mysterious forces clawing at their heels. “Doggerel” blurs together military commands and the violence of the natural world, meditating on the grim image of a dog torn to shreds by a wild boar. Elsewhere del Rio’s characters contemplate eternity, confront old gods, and strain in pursuit of truth that’s always just out of reach. He occasionally comes off as a harried street preacher, offering small wisdoms and impressionistic proverbs, like the one that closes “Reclaimed Church”: “The man who appears as a dog/Has the blood of a dog.”
If you don’t know exactly what he’s going on about, that’s probably the point. Del Rio has often spoken about his music’s adherence to the ideals of the speculative, surreal genre of prose called “weird fiction.” That term is a broad umbrella, linking literature across eras and continents, but its most famous practitioners create worlds both monstrous and mysterious, full of shadowy corners and distressing symbology. Writing in The Atlantic about an anthology of the genre that he co-edited a few years ago, the author Jeff VanderMeer theorized that its appeal stems from the way the real world often feels just as upsetting and unknowable as the ones in the stories. Weird fiction, he wrote, has a way of “showing us as we truly are. Unruly. Unruled. Superstitious. Absurd.” Before the Age of Mirrors does the same. Unhinged as it is, it’s a cathartic expression of the way the world is: messy, ugly, and real.
Buy: Rough Trade
