Something about Daph Veil, and her Bloodsucker, makes you a little more than usual you know that, when a song swishes around you and around, and around, and then it bites on you. Everything is united by the voice of Paula Laubach. It is mesmerizing in this daintily, as though she were withholding something huge, and you can sense all that not expressed feeling just boiling beneath. Her harmonies as they are superimposed on each other, when they are overlaid, are as glass - beautiful, yes, though with those rough edges that make you remember that beauty can cut. This is an ideal combination of the sweet and the bitter bite of knowing you have been duped, all of this being seductive and disturbing at the same time.
This musical line, the sultry and bluesy guitar line, begins the song, and makes one think those moments of silent calm before everything exploded. At first, it is smooth to the point where it is really too smooth and then gradually begins to unravel with the track. The music is convulsed and turned into something disorganized, just like that very sensation when something that once seemed intoxicating turns into your hands. The drums sounds are like waves beating the rocks, there are these spooky noises swirling in the background that render the entire experience not only very personal but also very weirdly expansive. It is an emotive free fall, yet it grabs.
It was created by Matt Parmenter in the Ice Cream Factory Studio in Austin and the very process of its production is all about contrast: these delicate silent scenes abruptly brash against naked rage. It does not simply sit back behind the feeling, it revs it up. Such minutiae play a role here: the bass is bass rumbling, the manner in which the harmonies by Laubach sound and dissipate, or all contribute to this beautiful discomfort, this sense of something being exposed. Something is beautiful in that it feels so imperfect, and that it reminds me of someone speaking a confession to the dark and then noticing that nobody is actually listening to them.
The thing that really remains to you about Bloodsucker is that it is so honest. It does not attempt to make pain pretty or romantic it merely exposes it. Laubach manages to make all that sloppy nonsense of loving someone poisonous and transforms it into something that feels empowering somehow the music itself seems to make her find clarity in the confusion. It is a reminder that though all is going to pieces, there is art you can squeeze out of it - and perhaps even healing. Daph Veil has made something that will not be put in your ears, rather it will be placed somewhere inside. Raw, movie-like, devastating like silent, and utterly real.
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