For The Hooves That GallopThe Loom – Here In the Deadlights available digitally 4/22/16
The Loom – a band from Brooklyn that has been called a “Next Big Thing” by the New York Times, “Best of What’s Next” by Paste Magazine, and a “World Café Next” band by WXPN – will release their second album Here in the Deadlights on April 22nd via Crossbill/Stereocilia.
However, Here in the Deadlights is not the record they set out to make upon returning from touring their debut album in mid-2012 (they made that album too, but more on that later). Instead, Deadlights both reflects and was made in the midst of the extremely difficult time that unfolded for band leader John Fanning upon their return: a life upending split from his longtime partner and best friend of fourteen years, the nearly lost mind and period of psychic and existential searching that followed, and the heavy lifting of rebuilding it all out of that collapse.
These circumstances, combined with the band’s collective and long-percolating obsessions with repetition, groove, atmosphere, and dissonance, honed across several hundred shows throughout the US and Canada and as far away as Poland, informed the shape of the new record. Deadlights was recorded with producer Kevin McMahon (Titus Andronicus, Real Estate) at Marcata Recording in upstate New York, and finds them digging more and more heavily into these inspirations,
stacking organs on top of organs and undergirding endless tangles of words with noisy guitars, set against horns run through delay pedals, all while maintaining the spirit and craft that led Daytrotter to write that The Loom “makes us believe that they’re the fathers and mothers of our cold and jagged memories, those that may or may not even be our memories for they feel so distant.”
Driven by psych-influenced guitars, songs like “I Am Not Young” and “Fire Makes” push towards connection and against the incessant passing of time, while “Ten Thousand Tiny Field Mice” is the repetitive, bracing sound of a mind unraveling (complete with manic saxophone breakdown from Phantom Family Halo’s David Lackner, who plays on “Fire Makes” as well).
“Some Voice Other than Mine” couples ominous minimalism with jarring noise, as the narrator strains to hear a sound outside of their own mind. “Only Electric Light” layers ethereal guitar loops and hollowed out drones to conjure the sound of too many days and hours spent under a fluorescent hum. Meanwhile “For Comfort Bates” builds on Lis Rubard’s mournful horn, while “Here in the Deadlights” layers delicate vocal harmonies as it reaches for forgiveness and redemption.
In other words, while the album marks a definitive end to a time in the life of a band and of its members, it also decidedly marks a new beginning: the sound of pushing through the darkness and coming out the other side, fundamentally changed and newly invigorated. Here in the Deadlights is the first of two new albums the band has completed with McMahon, and will be accompanied by spring tour dates.