We love our pink-lit pop music very much here at Vanyaland, but sometimes we need new sounds that take us on a darker journey to better reflect our current mood and set the sun earlier than usual. Enter New Orleans trio Guts Club, who not only welcome us to their world of heavy doom gaze, but do it in a way where we lose track of both time and ourselves. Their new effort “Cliffs/Walls” is not only the title track to an experimental post-metal album set for January release (apparently this group used to play dark country before the pandemic, society, and a lineup shift radicalized their sinister sound even further), it’s also a 10-minute atmospheric romp n’ stomp to the nether regions of the soul.
With a heightened task ahead, “Cliffs/Walls” emits a slow gradual build that’s as much a descent as an ascent. And that’s fitting, because our own sense of hell is never found along a straight line, and what we do en route defines us more than our feelings upon arrival.
“’Cliffs/Walls’ is a meditation on grief and how we navigate a world overflowing with extreme loss and devastation,” say Guts Club. “Some of us let it pass through us, some leap directly into it, others fight it, violently, until we’ve surrounded ourselves with walls too brutal to overcome. There is no resiliency; it is just knot after knot of trauma that we can only attempt to loosen or avert.”
Embark below.