Deafheaven: "Brought to the Water"

Structurally speaking, “Brought to the Water” recalls Deafheaven‘s 2014 one-off “From the Kettle Onto the Coil”: A Slayer-y head start builds the inertia necessary to transcend the thunderous verses and land on an inverse plain; that crushing chasm is disarmed and dismantled by way of warm, multilayered melodies. Here, Deafheaven make a slight departure from the trembling shoegaze passages that have become their trademark, incorporating some Mellon Collie stardust and—if you hone in on that jangling, arpeggiated chord progression—a hint of Sixpence None the Richer’s moonlit “Kiss Me”.

Innovative as it may be, the genre-bending isn’t what sets “Brought to the Water” apart. Since their inception, one of Deafheaven’s biggest assets has been their ability to express monumental sorrow in breathtakingly beautiful terms, thereby taking black metal’s traditionally nihilistic framework to heretofore unexposed heights. Vocalist George Clarke’s prose belies a kind of morbid yearning—he consciously closes his eyes to “sex and laughter” as “a multiverse of fuchsia and violet surrenders to blackness”—but his bandmates have a different plan entirely, staging their sunny assault as an act of rebellion. As the speak-shouter’s lyrical narrative begins its linear descent towards death, the guitars swoop in to rescue it from itself. It’s hopeful, transcendent—not so much a reconstruction of Deafheaven’s storied “Dream House” as it is a towering addition.

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