Certain low-grade forms of depression can be easy to embrace, as familiar and comforting as an old friend. Cancer House make downer music with the same allure, where all things lugubrious offer a strange, addictive solace. Take “Waterscene,” a dingy, dreary song that feels like day six of bedrest. Cobweb guitar melodies trace the room, crossing paths with spare, weary string arrangements. It’s held together by the faintest pulse of a bassline. Beguiling vocals emerge from the ether: cryptic, alien, impossible to decipher. The clearest words come at the end of its whisper-hushed speech: “Kill ’em, kill ’em.” It’s a bitter, broken wish from someone crushed by life. When the last phrase swings upward and curdles, it sounds like a final gasp for air.
Giving up doesn’t sound so bad on The Moth, Cancer House’s arresting, fully realized debut. In its blending of ’90s slowcore and post-rock, the Chicago quartet conjures an uneasy reprieve, casting resignation not as a dead end but an inevitable, enviable acceptance. “Flowers Over There” clarifies the group’s strategy. The reversed tape loop is a ghostly spirit that animates the track, and every other musical element is a bauble brought to life: the pitter-pattering percussion, the nimbly moving pizzicato. The vocals are sung so slowly that you can feel the shape of every word, but then suddenly, the track erupts into a fit of pained screaming. It’s the kind of thing you’d find on a ’90s emo 7″, but it doesn’t seem right to call it cathartic—it’s more like the unfurling of an ever-compounding misery.
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A lot of The Moth is about this sense of space and weight. “Camera Obscura” lets you feel the throb of its kick drum, the brushes that graze the snare. As voices arrive—some direct, some sampled—the track is subsumed by texture, demanding little in the way of lyrical comprehension. That ambiguity feels key, really, for a song that sounds like a dusty take on Bark Psychosis or Pygmalion; it’s easier to accept the bleak as eminently pretty when the words are hard to make out (“It’s always the wrong pill” is a line I only know from reading the record’s liner notes). No need to belabor the point—the emotions are obvious from the music itself. There’s a moment halfway through “Camera Obscura” when guitar chords are plucked in conjunction with the listless topline, and then siren-like vocals whirl around in quiet rapture: an invitation to embrace dejection.
A lot of the most somber music at the turn of the millennium was moving in its lo-fi recording quality. In its hi-def detailing, The Moth flips the script, ensuring immediate and constant immersion. Parts of “In My Pocket a Letter, a Red Wrecked Line,” for example, sound like a more enveloping Carissa’s Wierd or Rivulets or The Sonora Pine, but the seduction of such atmospheres gives pause—is this harmlessly engrossing or a dangerous festering?
I wonder that when the viola begins to weep. And I wonder it during The Moth’s last two songs, the haunted “Bloodchimes” and wheezing, woozy title track. They form an extended coda of sorts, reminiscent of Early Day Miners’ best album closer; given the songs that have come before, the nostalgic ambience is discomfiting. It’s in these passages where I remember the opener “Camera Obscura,” whose abrupt cut to silence offered a generous escape hatch. In sticking through these 30 minutes, numbness begins to feel aspirational. Maybe rotting in bed, The Moth suggests, should be something to pencil in.
