Public Memory is the solo nom de plume of Robert Toher, a Brooklyn-based musician who formerly served time as a member of Eraas and Apse. While those projects blurred the edges of rambling space rock and synthy post-punk, Public Memory dives headlong down the electronic darkwave rabbit hole, exploring a Korg-constructed sonic palette that weaves together a variety of primitive beats, delicately employed samples (bells, chimes, the weeping of ghosts), and woozy electronics that sound as if they might have been recorded at the bottom of a lake. Created over the course of a year while Toher was temporarily decamped in Los Angeles, Wuthering Drum is a work of restrained gloom—a remarkably textured electronic record whose minimalist tendencies keep it from collapsing under the weight of its own moribund aesthetic.
One of the problems with making dark electronic music has to do with the fact that so much of it already exists. Music that is already so immediately in thrall to its influences often comes off as pale imitation, a weird facsimile of something we’ve heard again and again and again. It’s to Toher’s credit that Wuthering Drum largely avoids goth pastiche. The ten tracks offered here rarely stray too far past the three-minute mark, which means there isn’t much time for the songs to meander or overstay their welcome. While it’s easy to play spot the influences with the songs on Wuthering Drum—there are nods to krautrock, as well as songs that conjure the ghosts of Fad Gadget, Suspiria-era Goblin and early Cabaret Voltaire—Toher largely succeeds in creating an electronic landscape that is wholly his own.
Rather than provide a series of peaks and valleys, Wuthering Drum is mostly one sustained valley in which the predominant vibe is dirge. “Mirror” moves with all the percussive relentlessness of a chain gang—a chugging beat offset by the sound of shakers, tambourine and celestial bells. Elsewhere, “Ringleader” and “As You Wish” unspool in largely the same manner—somber, elegantly plodding, chorus-free–with Toher’s disembodied vocals floating throughout. It’s only in the album's second half that the inertia finally breaks. “Zig Zag” is the record’s closest flirtation with a pop moment (via a finger-snap of a drum beat and a spooky synth hook) while “Earwig” breaks the sustained tension by introducing just a hint of what sounds like sampled steel drums and the faintest crack of what could be the lazer beam sound effect from an old Atari game. It’s hard to know, actually, since these sounds flitter into and out of the songs so quickly and quietly that they sometimes barely register; it’s only after repeated listens that subtle layering in these compositions start to make sense.
If there’s a problem with Wuthering Drum it might just be a lack of dynamics. All the songs are definitely of a piece and the album provides no shortage of sustained atmosphere, but there is a stifling sameness to these songs that makes them hard to differentiate. Adding to that are Toher’s vocals—a kind of warbly falsetto that brings to mind the warped new wave of an old Blank Dogs record, or something like the sound of a very tremulous apparition anxiously singing to you from another room. As a result, the vocals hover at the edges of these songs with a kind of hopeless disaffection that eventually becomes numbing, you keep wishing for a howl or a yelp or a scream that might punctuate the airless, suffocating universe in which these songs seem to exist. That is not to say that the record is not often quite beautiful—in fact, the record sounds amazing—but you can’t help but wish that Toher might let his hair down a little more. Too often these songs pull back just when you want them to crack open—rather than build to some sort of satisfying conclusion, they simply end.
While lots of ostensibly “dark” music suffers lyrically from the cliché of sounding like tortured teenage poetry, the songs on Wuthering Drum eschew hackneyed doom-and-gloom in favor of near incomprehensibility. When Toher sings about “an alleged near disaster / long toothed man that runs” on album-opener “Heir” it’s all but impossible to know what/who he’s talking about, but ultimately that’s also part of the record’s charm. The evocative, fractured nature of Toher’s lyrics—paired with the austere sonic landscapes and willful ambiguity of these songs—is what sets Public Memory apart from so many other like-minded electronic acts mining similar territory. When the elements all come together in the right way—as they do on the record’s centerpiece, “Cul de Sac”–the results can be stunning. Over a funereal beat and a lilting piano melody that could serve as a long lost sonic cousin to Joy Division’s "The Eternal," Toher articulates the profound isolation at the album’s core: “I live in small room with all my things in place,” he sings, “I see no reason to pretend / lock the front door / shut the curtains / it’s a matter of dissent.” Wuthering Drum is a work seemingly unconcerned about giving you what you want, but what it does provide is almost enough.
