Instrumental music can accomplish a great many things, but one thing it’s not so good at is storytelling. It’s no wonder, then, that when Melynda Jackson of the defunct, long-running instrumental collective SubArachnoid Space launched the heavy, stripped down doom metal project Eight Bells as singer/guitarist, she had a few stories up her sleeve. Or in the case of Eight Bells, one ambitious tale. The trio’s 2013 debut, The Captain’s Daughter, comprised four songs that formed a story arc about a character lost at sea; on Eight Bells’ new album, Landless, that character makes it home. Spoiler alert: Things don’t go well.
Landless is drenched in isolation. "Hating" scrapes its way across a gulf of despair, with wraithlike vocals and numbed melodies hanging over pinprick prog fretwork. The riffs are meaty and vast, but the pulse of ethereal '70s rock—from Pink Floyd to Hawkwind’s more celestial moments—haunts "Hold My Breath," which nods to more modern influences with an intricate, off-kilter, Isis-esque groove. There’s an ambience to Landless, bottled like smoke in numerous passages throughout the album, but it reaches track-length mass on "The Mortal’s Suite," an echoing exhalation of negative space and gothic grays. It’s as though Jackson has taken the flights of fantasy that SubArachnoid Space specialized in, edited them down, and folded them into an ashen doom.
For an album about aloneness, there’s a lush synergy to Landless. Dual vocal lines emanate from some unseen place, sometimes braided together in a conjoined plea for connection, sometimes adrift in solitude. On "Touch Me," that dynamic is brought to a stunning culmination; Jackson and bassist/singer Haley Westeiner whisper and drone in a fugue of hushed desperation, harmonizing but always just out of phase.
As for Landless’ narrative, it’s not exactly a solid one. The album’s title track, nearly 13 colossal minutes long, sheds wisps of images and ghostly chants that melt into the ether. It’s heartbreakingly beautiful, veering between shoegaze-inflected dreaminess and blackened blurs without lapsing into metalgaze tropes. Whatever has befallen Jackson’s protagonist isn’t entirely clear; all that’s certain is that the ending, like the beginning and middle, are lost in a fog of otherworldliness and doubt. Ultimately, the narrative isn’t about the words so much as the atmosphere—and in the saga that is Landless, voices are just one more glorious instrument spelling out an epic, tragic fate.
