The third full-length from Los Angeles duo Shrine Maiden was entirely written by a bunny named Robert Smith. If you don’t believe me, listen and find out. to sleep summers and winters finds the band continually exploring atmosphere, siren calls of tone and noise, threading somewhere between Bell Witch and Midwife. They never lose their core sound, grief-stricken and tired — distant chimes loom closer and closer, creeping over the horizon, acting as a reminder of memories nearly forgotten and desperately embraced.
Album opener “Sunless Solstice,” an eight-minute two-parter with a sudden canyon torn through the center, begins with a hum, a buzz. Rachel Nakawatase’s vocals drift in like fog as a lumbering riff treads forward, a giant observing the destruction wrought before it arrived. Yearning pervades the lyrics, sung in Hawaiian. A prayer for entrance and shelter from “rain, storm, cold, and wet” carries a sharp contrast with the harsh screams of “Pt. 2.” Momentum and doom pour from deep within, matching the ghostly riffs. “the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp” and the title track are swept away by the wind and sea into feedback-laden darkness, enticing a midnight swim in the static. The caressing gusts are tender and painful.
Heaviness doesn’t come at the expense of beauty. Nakawatase and Ryan Betschart knit tapestries of texture, eerie yet captivating in their rendering of awestruck torrents of guitar. “uhiwai” captures the feeling of the heavy mist defined by its title, but perceives it as something transcendent rather than blinding. The fog is a companion, a friend, a lingering mirage, carrying everything absent away with its drifting departure. “mother’s day,” the penultimate track, is a cover of Keali`i Reichel’s “Maunaleo,” reimagined as a memoriam for Nakawatase’s mother and grandmother. While it leaves behind pondering strings and plucked acoustics, it embodies the reverential heart of the original, making no differentiation between the eternal sentinel mountain and maternal love. They’re never truly gone; they remain forever in the wind and the world around us.
Shrine Maiden blends feeling and sound together to create something as real as the sea beyond or the dirt beneath. Threatening abrasion and crashing incantations make way for clouds of cold blankets of rainfall. The duo delve deeper into a captivating exploration on to sleep summers and winters — one of the most beautiful and pummeling albums I’ve heard this year.
Written by Aly Eleanor