Sometimes a band name comes across my screen and makes me think for a long time. Take Bliss Abyss, for example. We’ve covered their singles “red disgusting” and “wrecked” already. But since writing that first article about them, I haven’t stopped ruminating over their name. Bliss: Complete and perfect happiness, supreme joy, deep contentment. Abyss: A bottomless pit, a deep chasm, an immeasurable void, usually a metaphor for intense depression or despair. The name has dichotomy and it rhymes. Absolute beauty.
That dichotomy carries through each track of Bliss Abyss’s self-titled debut record, ten tracks from the Bay Area that blend bright instrumentality with bitter wordplay. It’s the brainchild of Peter Wallner, an Oakland musician and fixture in the scene who has played with groups like Deafheaven and Wax Idols. Along with collaborators Joey Weed, Ross Traver, and Josh Unger, Wallner has crafted a fine first album under this name, utilizing his masterful songwriting and penchant for ’90s musical styles that sound as fresh as ever.
Overall, the music paints the visual of “slacker rock”: Chilling out in video stores and joking with friends to avoid the trappings of school or home, smoking behind the bleachers to avoid getting caught, or sneaking out and ducking into a basement on a school night to drink and hear some loud fuzzy music to escape from the world. Wallner’s new album encapsulates that vibe well: Getting so deep into pleasure to avoid the muck of the world, but getting stuck in the muck because you can’t or won’t escape the pleasure.
Things kick off with the upbeat “red disgusting”, which we’ve covered. Its vibrant indie sound masks Wallner’s dark lyricism: “Another bite of a poison apple / I’m so disgusted that I adore you.” It’s a breakup song about narrative control, where one person shows flashes of their rotten side to someone who can’t stop loving them. But on the track, Wallner refuses to take part in letting that emotional vandalism destroy him: “Get out of my house, get out of my bed / You bright-eyed grifter!”
The lead track introduces Wallner’s ability to squeeze melody and upbeat music out of darkness. “wrecked”, the other song we’ve written about, is all about following someone who can’t stop destroying themselves and nearly getting destroyed in the process. Metaphors of fire, broken cars, dancing in parking lots, and debasement run throughout the track, but the shimmering guitars and upbeat vibe make it impossible not to dance along. There’s a similar theme on “suns on fire”, which sings of a passionate tryst with someone who dabbles in mystery, leaving their partner in the dark about their true nature.
Wallner knows when to bring down the tempo: Tracks like “long shot” and “impersonator” take on a more shoegaze-oriented sound, while “purse” almost enters goth territory with its chugging bass. The latter track uses the slower speed to reflect a sense of mindlessness, of being so out of it that it’s hard to remember how everything in your purse – or the bruises on your legs – got there. The party must have been grand, but what were the consequences?
The back half of the album digs its claws into the thick soup of raw emotion. Even though “feral” is about Wallner getting his cat back from a thief, the rapid-fire beat and fierce fuzz from the guitars would insinuate something less innocent: “My love is an animal / Once I’ve caught the scent, it’s unbearable.” This is a song for being out of one’s mind at a dark club, for shared lust in an alley, or for a hot moment in a parking garage stairwell, a dark corner of a house party, or a motel room after a few too many drinks at the dive next door.
“spectrophilia” drops the band name – “I know there’s bliss in the abyss” – as Wallner sings of seeking love in the spiritual realm, dipping into the dark world of phantoms and ghosts. It’s a chiming ode to clinging to the unknown, unable to shake attraction to mystery no matter how self-destructive. Sometimes that comes in the form of people who wear a pretty mask to hide their ugly feelings, invisible demons tucked under glistening makeup and beautiful words. Wallner knows the risk involved with dancing with these devils: “I’m going out on phantom limbs with crystals and candles.”
The penultimate track “fragile & furious” acts as a bookend to “red disgusting”, a minor-key mirror to the first song’s upbeat melodies. If this were the last track, it would end the record in a blaze of fury, a full-throated attack against the entity Wallner can’t seem to shake. But the darkness bites both ways, with neither party getting out of the poisonous partnership alive: “It’s so hard to do nothing / To breathe air and drink water / To begin at the end.”
But the album doesn’t end with anger: It ends with “star”, which was the first single from the album released last November. The track begins with an ethereal hum which sounds almost cleansing, before driving into a positive banger in which Wallner sings of self-affirmation. “The song started as a kind of spell, a vision of manifesting a life worth living,” Wallner says about the track on its Bandcamp page. “Picture the life you want, the person you actually are, and don’t let anyone’s bullshit block your light.” It is an antithesis to the album’s theme. Where the first nine tracks on the album are about wading through the abyss to find bliss, “star” insinuates that the abyss is unnecessary; the bliss has been here the whole time.
While each track on the album pops on its own, Bliss Abyss’s self-titled debut is one to listen to straight through. Wallner’s blend of slacker pop, shoegaze, indie, and goth-punk mesh to form a sonic story about growth, whether it’s growing out of bad habits or bad relationships. It is poetic to start in medias res with “red disgusting” — the thick of things going wrong — and to end with the final blow of “fragile & furious” and the purification of “star”.
But then again, Wallner would know a thing about poetry, given his choice of a band name that rhymes. I’m going to continue thinking about Bliss Abyss for quite a while, and you should as well. Take a listen to the new album below.
Written by Will Sisskind
