MP3: Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words - Ashen like the sky
A new month and a new Record Club selection means that my usual Friday flashback post has been preempted. June's pick: "Fall, fall, falling" from Göteborg-based artist Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words, an absolute crushing record. As DLSODW mainman Thomas Ekelund himself puts it, "It's about yearning, for what was, for what could've been or for it to never have existed. It's about breaking down...apart... up. It's about grotesque reactions and the distortion of memories. It's about self-destruction, -mutilation and -loathing. It's about scars/shards. It's about that sinking feeling. It's about falling." Make no mistake, this is a devastating work, but like all of the best doom-oriented music, its innate sense of foreboding and suffocation is tempered with aching beauty. It's in the darkness that the inspiration and the will to carry on is rediscovered. This is not brutality for brutality's sake, like Brighter Death Now for instance, this is looking deeper.
Previous Dead Letters work tended towards minimalist drone and, while that's still very present, Ekelund has now started to work with much more well-defined rhythms and melody. Today's mp3 selection "Ashen like the sky" is one of the more extreme examples, sounding something like Godflesh buried at sea. A lot of electronic music can seem cold and distant, but I find that Dead Letters always retains a strong sense of earth or organicness, something I attribute to the fact that everything he does sounds as if it's been rolled in shit and dirt. The method behind the music is digital, but the feeling is very human, very real. The result is very powerful and, naturally, very highly recommended.
Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words - Ashen like the sky