Worm Ouroboros is a hit-and-miss name: The handle sounds frightening, of course, with its image of an annelid stretching into a circle to engulf its own tail. It's the sort of moniker that suggests a gang of crusty punks or a band of black metal bros, all loud and mean and vile. But Worm Ouroboros is actually guitarist/singer Jessica Way and bassist/keyboardist Lorranie Rath, accompanied on each of their two albums by a different drummer. The Bay Area group plays as softly as the two sing, their ethereal harmonies luxuriating above musical atmospheres that shift shapes like thick white clouds. Wading between waters of doom metal and gossamer atmospherics, Way and Rath's music moves with a wonderfully graceful menace that's far less terrifying than the name might indicate. But as "Worm Ouroboros" rightly suggests, the eight-minute drifts and builds that this band makes are borne of persistence, diligence, and care. Their sense of restraint turns the rare trick of making 4AD-adherent epics stop just short of maudlin.
The band's second album Come the Thaw sharpens the focus of their 2010 self-titled debut by giving each instrumental part what essentially amounts to more respect. Like recent records by the blues-crawling Earth, Worm Ouroboros makes layered music that doesn't sound overly dense or distracted, so that each player is able not only to convey shades of meaning but also to push each song along in unexpected ways. Though never very loud, Rath's remarkable bass playing shakes the frame. On "Further Out", her thick lines dart beneath Way's languid guitar, not only shouldering the melody but also serving as the tonal anchor. Way's playing during "Withered" is marvel of dynamics, each steely note refracted as if through a crystal. She finally climbs into a riff, though, and like a spartan Crazy Horse, the rest of the band follows, lashing hard against its back. Its hard-won redemption, the sort of coda that feels deserved.
Drummer Aesop Dekker proves Worm Ouroboros' perfect complementary third. If you've heard his 1990s punk bands or his current black-metal benders Agalloch and Ludicra, you know playing heavy isn't a worry for him. Last year, he wrote about his favorite jazz albums for NPR. By splitting the meter during "Withered" and darting (slowly) around the beat of "Further Out", he proves that such talk isn't a feint, but is instead a tool. Here, he's constantly on the boundary of heavy-- insistent but not impatient, always present but never upstaging. He breaks through only when necessary, adding dimension and weight to the nebulous movement. All the space on Come the Thaw simply galvanizes those bigger moments, affording simple rock-trio-taking-a-solo moments a rare kind of majesty and power. That feeling is appropriate, too, since Come the Thaw lyrically focuses on processes that take months, years or lifetimes to reach-- birth, blossoming, death, discovering-- but only an instant to fulfill. "We feed our days on measured hours," Rath reassures at one point, singing with such softness and slowness that it feels as if these units of time are only foreign abstractions.
During "When We Are Gold", Rath opens with a question. "What have we won/ when all is won?" she sings, pulling at each syllable like strips of gauze as feather-light guitar, bass, and drums wind through each other. This track is not only the album's best but its loudest, pushing from a place close to stillness and silence into, after nine minutes, the sort of near-roar that might fit between two Agalloch bursts or on any record that attempts to truss post and hard rock. But the climax matters here less than that opening credo; in the context of Come the Thaw, an album that's very much concerned with the slow cycles of nature and life, it seems a subtle indictment of music that mistakes volume and motion for emotion and substance. Worm Ouroboros are more concerned with the core of their music than the crescendos that that might propel. It's a good thing, too, because these songs-- however quiet or calm they become-- bear a great weight with remarkable elegance.
