Holographic Violence is the third album in six years from Seattle’s Grave Babies, and it amounts to a costume change for their usual reverb-drenched, hollowed-out guitar noise: They've gone from garage to gothic. And we’re not talking a subtle nod to the Sisters of Mercy or Killing Joke sprinkled here or there. No, this would be candle-lit-bat-cave, Peter-Murphy-drinking-merlot-out-of-a-human-skull levels of goth. Generally, this switch serves the album well, as Grave Babies' earlier work felt a bit lost in the shuffle of the Bay Area garage rock revival of the late '00s. However, with song titles like "Pain Iz Pleasure" and "Punishment (Only a Victim)", it's not so clear where appreciation ends and pastiche begins. That's not a dig, actually—few scenes are more susceptible to parody than goth music, and for good reason; it can always feel embarrassing to celebrate negative emotions, but that's also what makes it deliciously indulgent.
Grave Babies' music has always flirted with darkness, but the alienation and misanthropy of Violence feels new. Part of this shift may be attributed to personnel: Sometime between the releases of Crusher and Violence, frontman and songwriter Danny Wahlfeldt overhauled Grave Babies' permanent roster with Bryce Brown of Crypts on bass, Claire Haranda on synths, and the key addition of Mark Gajadhar from cult post-hardcore poster boys Blood Brothers on drums. Gajadhar duly takes his place as Violence's MVP, his precise, no-nonsense style (intertwined throughout the album with drum machines) propulsing everything forward, step by step, as Wahlfeldt's controlled chaos shudders and swirls around him.
Violence opens with the near-shoegaze distortion of "Eternal (On & On)", with layer upon layer of guitars and synthesizers washing over Wahfeldt's echoing, distorted baritone: "A life that leaves without a purpose/ And on and on and on it goes..." It would be easy to imagine it as the soundtrack to a sci-fi film where teenagers in bondage gear roam a dystopian wasteland. "Try 2 Try" brings the tone even lower with heavy, syncopated guitars swamping through the mix as Haranda's keyboard line struggles to pop through. It works, giving the music the needed edge to create density without slog. "Something Awful" owes a whole lot to Disintegration-era Cure, or even Peter Hook, as Brown's buoyant bass takes center stage, carrying the album into its middle stage, which, like with many goths themselves, can get awkward. It's not a lack of direction, or even musicianship, that causes Violence to ultimately lag. It's perhaps not even a lack of tunes, as "N2 Ether" and its warbly vocal hook make for a welcome pick-me-up further down the tracklisting.
It's just at some point, the album loses its flavor, and songs begin to mash and bleed into each other in a not-exactly-purposeful or interesting way. It's not unlistenable, far from it, it just gets slowly (very, very slowly) bogged and drowned under its own ideas. In a landscape where bands are encouraged more and more to play it safe and appeal to their same couple thousand Twitter followers over and over again, it's commendable that Grave Babies took this leap of faith and changed their direction so drastically. In the end, though, Violence comes off as transitional, a building block for a bigger, darker, blacker record that may be in Grave Babies' future.
