Unlike, say, that famous “Portlandia” sketch, there is nothing twee or saccharine about the birds you’ll hear on Philadelphia noise-rock quartet Empath’s records. Take “No Attachment,” from their new four-song cassette, Liberating Guilt and Fear. It opens with a burst of frenetic hardcore drumming. With blunt ferocity, singer, guitarist, and sometime bassist Catherine Elicson proclaims that she feels “no attachment to myself.” The clamor is briefly and beguilingly interrupted by a twisty bass melody, then dissolves entirely into a chorus of manic tweeting and chirping. These aren’t the birds that get printed on tote bags—they’re the ones a cartoon character might hear, as stars circled her head, after taking a punch to the jaw.
That isn’t a bad metaphor for the music of Empath, which alternates between punk violence, pop sparkle, and art-rock experimentalism, often layering all three together in compositions that sound aggressive and otherworldly at once. Half-buried in the mix, Elicson’s vocals can build from whispery cooing to feverish screaming within a single track.
Originally a trio comprised of Ohioan Elicson and two New York state transplants, drummer Garrett Koloski and keyboardist Emily Shanahan, Empath fuse their Midwestern lo-fi pop and upstate hardcore influences with their shared love for jazz skronk and sundry extramusical sounds. The addition of Randall Coon on synths, plus tape loops from co-producer Shaun Sutkus, makes Guilt and Fear fuller, stranger, catchier, and more distinctive than anything they’ve done before.
Despite its brevity, the tape showcases Empath’s range. At the core of “The Eye,” which escalates to a chorus where Elicson chants “You don’t have to spend all of that money on me, baby,” is a hook of pop-radio proportions. But what makes it the best song Empath have released—and one of the year’s most spellbinding singles to date—is the way that vocal melody bounces off bright keyboard tones and pushes through the clatter of drums and cymbals. The mostly submerged lyrics are a secret message that you have to decode if you want to sing along (and you will). “Be the tear that washes out the eye” is Elicson’s parting plea, a bittersweet exhortation borrowed from a poem by Adrienne Rich.
At the opposite extreme is closing track “III,” a wordless piece that’s more like sound art than a song and, at nine minutes long, takes up more than half of the cassette’s runtime. Windy howling, squalling feedback, heavenly drones, and drums that pound like sneakers on pavement evoke constantly shifting environments. A tropical jungle during rainy season dissolves into a tornado tearing up the Great Plains or a city caught in a midnight thunderstorm. Alongside the suggestion of elephants trumpeting, there are sounds that feel man-made: helicopter propellers, weathervanes gone haywire, viscous liquid being sucked through a straw.
“III” may be the purest representation of the Empath aesthetic. It brings forth a lush, harsh, immersive alternate reality that marries the natural and the artificial, like a sonic equivalent to the fake flowers and neon lights in their video for “The Eye” (which Elicson shot in the house where she and Koloski live). The birds are present for all nine minutes of “III,” too, their chirping equal parts tranquil and hysterical, hovering above the glittery mess to herald the arrival of a band whose dazzling versatility doesn’t come at the cost of coherence.
