“My Own Dead / Song for a Sickhead” Prove Black Ends Don’t Miss
In this picture: me starving for more Black Ends. (Album art by Nicolle Swims.)
It’s been almost three years since the last Black Ends release, and that makes people (like me) who are ravenous for another morsel of music from one of Seattle’s best bands start to salivate at even a whiff of new material.
We got two songs on Friday, each in preparation for an alleged upcoming album. While the paltry pair might seem a little cruel after so much time, I actually think it’s brilliant. We live in a world where over 100,000 songs are released to Spotify every single day, and where the maligned concept of “content” threatens to homogenize all personal expression. It makes sense to put your work to a drip-feed, to make us really care about what gets delivered to us. And these songs are worth caring about regardless, because they both accomplish the arduous task of delivering exactly what we expect from Black Ends while promulgating exciting new avenues for the band.
The A-side, “My Own Dead,” is the more accessible of the two, in that it pulls off the classic trick of delivering the pleasant sense of pattern recognition that stems from verse-chorus structure while circumventing the stagnacy that often comes with it. The song is a journey, from Nicolle Swims’ initial bluesy swing that opens up into a seasick wave of cymbal crashes and cavernous bass guitar, which then transitions into thundering double bass hits and dramatic, harmonized guitar. Up to its abrupt ending, not a second of its runtime feels wasted.
“Song for a Sickhead” plays around a little more with time, fitting in three or four false starts, ratcheting up the tension as it crash-lands into a pile of gorgeous sevenths. Swims’ voice, as usual, functions like an iridescent oil slick coating the chords. It still sounds like it belongs to nobody else, and its rubberiness is so integral to their music; if I’m singing a Black Ends song to myself I can’t sing it any other way, and it’s a ton of fun to try and imitate its contours. Here it provides a dissonance until the chorus finally rushes in, where Billie Jessica Paine unleashes a torrent of rim clicks and snare hits that bleed right through to the next chorus. The band’s extended outro provides a bookend to the song’s atom-like structure, the frenetic rush of distortion and drum hits its nucleus.
Together, the track eradicate any pervading uncertainities about Black Ends’ development as a band. I’ll miss Jonny Modes as a drummer, but based on the material here (and on their recent live shows) Paine more than makes up for his absence. Like Swanson, she’s an absolute beast on her instrument and an ideal complement to Swims’ murky guitar textures. Legendary local producer Jack Endino also returns to the fray, although he’s only doing recording here. He, along with mixer Don Farwell and mastering engineer Cameron Frank, make the band sound enormous. The guitar sounds are rich, the low floor feels enormous, and the drums hit with herculean force.
The combined effect of “My Own Dead” and “Song for a Sickhead” is that they make me even more excited for an LP than I already was, and I didn’t think that was possible. Black Ends are set to tour Europe starting tomorrow, and I’m hoping their foray across the pond leaves an imprint the way they’ve done here.