When Sam Shackleton moved to Berlin in 2008, it was easy to assume that, trading one scene for another, he was abandoning dubstep for techno. There was plenty of cross-pollination between the two genres at the time, much of it ascribed to Shackleton and his own Skull Disco label. The British artist came from the darkest, dankest corners of the bass music scene, yet Ricardo Villalobos was playing out his tracks; indeed, Villalobos even remixed “Blood on My Hands” into a hair-raising after-hours anthem, paving the way for Shackleton to release his debut album on Perlon, the iconic minimal techno label.
In retrospect, though, it looks more like Shackleton, true to his name, was setting off for points unknown, points that can't be found on any of the usual techno-tourist maps of the German capital. Holed up in Neukölln in a kind of self-imposed exile, Shackleton has progressively estranged himself from established sounds. Instead, he has invented his own tonal and textural language, turning into a genre of one in the process. Since 2010, when he launched his Woe to the Septic Heart! label, he has channeled his dub bass lines and vaguely Middle Eastern percussion into an increasingly complex and porous weave of deep hues, glistening timbres, smeared echo, and rippling polyrhythms, dappled with shadow and overlaid with spoken-word vocals that read like scraps of dream logic.
His masterpiece so far has been 2012's Music for the Quiet Hour / The Drawbar Organ EPs, a box set combining tense rhythm studies and ambient sketches with a sprawling, psychedelic suite in the vein of Coil’s Musick to Play in the Dark. That set ran nearly two-and-a-half hours long, but with 2014's Freezing Opening Thawing, he proved that he could say just as much in more concise formats: The three-track, 24-minute EP was his most rhythmically and timbrally dazzling work to date.
Devotional Songs follows seamlessly from his past half-decade’s worth of releases. Featuring the bright colors and staccato attack of mallet player Raphael Meinhart and the fluid lines of keyboardist/accordionist Takumi Motokawa, it is his most compositionally ambitious work yet: four long tracks, three of them between 10 and 13 minutes long, full of cycling arpeggios and intricate counterpoints and wild cadenzas throwing off harmonic sparks. It is the least obviously electronic thing he has ever done: For long stretches, acoustic and electric timbres dominate, with Shackleton’s synthesizers and effects frequently relegated to a background role, and much of the time, there's no percussion at all, save for Meinhart’s vibraphone and marimba. Elsewhere, Shackleton’s drums have never sounded less like machines. It’s easy to imagine these songs, suffused as they are in bells and chimes, being performed in some misty clearing high on a Japanese mountaintop, with nary a power strip in sight.
But the album breaks from the rest of Shackleton’s catalog in one very important way. This isn’t the first time he’s worked with vocals; much of his early work featured gravelly dub poetry from his frequent collaborator Vengeance Tenfold. But this is the first time he has ever worked with a singer. And Devotional Songs’ featured performer is not just any vocalist; it’s Ernesto Tomasini, a four-octave opera singer from Palermo whose CV includes both classical opera and collaborations with Coil’s Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson and Nurse With Wound’s Andrew Liles; For a time, he performed in clubs as the Electro Castrato. It’s his voice that gives Devotional Songs its unmistakable character, less opera than British progressive rock of the ’70s. His melodies often resemble virtuosic updates to This Heat’s incantations; occasionally, his open-ended melodies suggest a more sinister version of Dead Can Dance’s Brendan Perry.
Shackleton has always had a flair for the dramatic—his label is, after all, called Woe to the Septic Heart!—but Devotional Songs is orders of magnitude more theatrical, beginning with Tomasini’s booming voice and extravagant enunciation. The lyrics are goth bordering on camp. “Don’t look behind, don’t look back/All signs point to our untimely death,” runs the refrain of “Twelve Shared Addictions,” an abject listicle (“Twelve shared addictions/eleven filthy thoughts/ten relentless traumas,” etc.) that splits the difference between “The Twelve Days of Christmas” and Swans’ fetishism of failure. The droning, birdsong-laced “Rinse Out All Contaminants” is visited by “the pounding fist of malcontent”; in the spooky “You Are the One,” Tomasini sings of plagues and boiling blood in a querulous voice, while the ominous chants of “Father, You Have Left Me” make James Blake’s take on filial abandonment look like a Hallmark movie in comparison.
Devotional Songs is occasionally—often, even—heavy going. It possesses a certain Janus-faced quality, to use a metaphor I’m sure Shackleton and Tomasini would appreciate, flitting from cool, hypnotic instrumental passages into full-on breast-beating mode. But the album is also possessed of a sly sense of humor. Its excesses have a cartoonish aspect that are in keeping with the Zeke Clough’s gory cover art for Skull Disco and Woe to the Septic Heart!; they render Shackleton's bathetic tendencies—let’s not forget that he once wrote a song about watching the Twin Towers fall on 9/11—with a welcome nudge and wink. Devotional Songs is an album that no one but Shackleton could have made, and its unexpected turn to the operatic suggests that Shackleton’s own septic heart may be sweeter than anyone had previously thought—and that, in any case, it certainly hasn’t run out of surprises.
