Weyrd Son Records – 30 April 2021
Filmic Darkwave on Glaare's latest release.
Glaare's second full length album release takes its name from the Clive Baker novella that spawned the Hellraiser franchise, Your Hellbound Heart. Much like the text it is an album that explores the extremities of the dissimulation that occurs between pleasure and pain, between tenebrous longing and the torturous nature of desire. It is a mood captured in the intersection between a sleek if ominous instrumentation and a highly emotive vocal delivery. The motorised percussive momentum of the drums are punctuated by gloomy echoic reverberations, which in turn are interspersed with sections of a lilting pop sensibility.
Things open with “Young Hell”, where an initially tremulous synth gives way to a forceful rhythm and a vocal that weaves in and out of the mix. Guitar drenched in a post-punk resonance bumps up against the hoover like bass sounds. “For Sale” comes in with an intro that exudes the looming menace of a Sisters of Mercy track. Pounding drum machine style rhythms sit beneath a stretched out drone before coming to the fore as the eponymous vocal refrain continues to explore the tone of agitated reflection.
The galvanic qualities of the record draw heavily on the slick production values of electronica, albeit with a melancholic impetus. There is a burnished and filmic quality to much of the composition. What emerges are tracks that could score the crepuscular, rain slicked panorama of a vast and unforgiving city scape.
At times Glaare explicitly foregrounds this aesthetic of icy apocalyptic futurism. Such is the case on “Terminator 2”, which opens with elongated synthy bleeps over an insistent motorik style beat. It then develops into a mid tempo track, that is deliberative if a touch subdued as it considers the plight of the film's central character, ‘counting the days since you were gone, I'm blowing away, won't be long.'
Mirrors ramps up the sense of impending dread with a sound that is as capacious as it is darkly evocative. There is an uneasy quality to the whirring near siren-like noises that bookend the song. The shadowy aura of misrecognition and uncertainty are also explored lyrically with reference made to ‘silhouettes untimely'.
Your Hellbound Heart is an often melancholic and ruminative record in keeping with its Darkwave stylings. The whole edifice is slick, polished and in places highly affecting. At times it feels perhaps as if it is constructed along the well oiled machinations of a formula that works but doesn't deviate too far from type. However, when it does succeed you could imagine the looming presence of the demonic creatures the Cenobites observing from the liminal realm of these songs.