Blackwater Holylight are not a conventionally heavy band. On Not Here Not Gone, their fourth album and first since moving to Los Angeles from Portland, they pull from doom, black metal, and the well-mannered shoegaze of bands like Hum, offering their most consistent and propulsive set of songs yet. Yes, there’s plenty of distortion, more than on any of their previous albums; yes, the slowly trilling riff of “Spade” will have you wondering which Black Sabbath song it reminds you of (it’s “Sweet Leaf”). But unlike so much of the heavy music with which it’s conversant, Not Here Not Gone doesn’t see heaviness as an end in itself, or even as its dominant mode. It’s heavy in the way a difficult conversation is heavy, or the way someone’s expectations can weigh you down. Like Emma Ruth Rundle’s On Dark Horses or Chelsea Wolfe’s Hiss Spun, Not Here Not Gone is a bruised singer-songwriter album that’s been brined in overdrive.
Even at their doomiest—2019’s Veils of Winter—Blackwater Holylight’s music has tended to feel wraithlike, a tired ghost’s memory of horror rather than an encounter with trauma itself. Not Here Not Gone is similarly spectral, even as Sonny Diperri’s production highlights the same bricked-out guitars and rounded low end with which he’s helped DIIV, Narrow Head, and Rundle herself assemble their own walls of sound. But the music here has a thin and papery quality, as if Blackwater Holylight aren’t trying to overwhelm their audience with noise so much as protect them from it, and it emphasizes the ache at the center of many of these songs.
The approach is most effective on the album’s opening and best track, “How Do You Feel.” With a sleetstorm of guitars rattling off the windows, singer and guitarist Sunny Faris narrates the final moments before a couple parts forever. Her voice is tired but poised as she drifts in thought. “How will you feel without me,” she wonders; “how will you live without me?” The scene is set with meaningful pauses, loaded with implication. It’s obvious that the narrator has thought through the future more carefully than the person to whom she’s singing and that she knows it. Faris never sounds like she’s in danger of being swept away, or like she’s trying to obliterate the person at the other end of the exchange. The potential violence of the music, embedded within its noise, is neutralized by the tenderness with which she and her bandmates play.
Distancing techniques like this pop up across Not Here Not Gone. “I’m lost in lust,” Faris sings in “Void to Be,” and lest you confuse that for ecstatic horniness, the earthy thump and thwack of Eliese Dorsay’s drums almost immediately give way to a cold and starlit verse: “I wish you never would have called me baby,” Faris sings, her voice full of sober regret. “Bodies” begins with an L7-style lurch that quickly softens under the vocal melody; the angst and tension of the song’s introduction remain, lingering in the air like haze after a storm.
Cumulatively, these moves sidestep the traditional tricks of shoegaze and metal in a way that feels distinctly feminine, at least to my feminized ears. By making the heaviness of the music serve the affective weight of the songwriting, the band amplifies its emotional charge and keeps the emphasis on the difficulty of relationships, power dynamics, love—all the destabilizing things that happen between people. And when they do shift into something like black metal, in closer “Poppyfields,” Dorsay pounds out the double kick but keeps her focus on the ride cymbal, never hammering out a blast beat, while Faris and Mikayla Mayhew strum their guitars rather than tremolo-pick them in fury. It makes the song seem to float over its own angst, as though it were both an incantation and that which the incantation summons. Even the tone of the guitars that wallpaper “Involuntary Haze” sounds thin and brittle, much closer to Rid of Me than Souvlaki. It positions the band somewhere between presence and disaffection, which seems appropriate for a song about dissociation.
The fatigue lurking within the album is easy to identify with; it’s the exhaustion that comes with having been through so much and realizing far more is expected of you. Not here, not gone, but somewhere in between—aware of the present threat and building a fortress against it. For an album rooted in music sprung from psychedelic abstraction and campy fantasy, it’s real heavy shit.
