Drew McDowall, “A Thread, Silvered and Trembling” (Dais, 2024)
For some reason, I slept on this fourth solo album from former Coil/Psychic TV visionary Drew McDowall, but I decided to go back and revisit it after being blown away by this year’s Magnetism and was delighted to discover that A Thread, Silvered and Trembling is yet another deeply psychotropic electronic masterpiece.
This one arguably differs from some other McDowall releases, however, as it was explicitly inspired by “an elegiac solo bagpipe style called pibroch (ceòl mòr in Gaelic)” that is “traditionally used for laments and for tributes to the dead,” but he’s been interested in the style for quite some time and credits it among the inspirations behind Coil’s iconic Time Machines. Notably, McDowall also departed from his usual fare by enlisting a small orchestral ensemble, but most of the acoustic instrumentation has been texturally transformed into unrecognizability to such an extent that no one is likely to mistake this for a traditional music album any time soon.
Impressively, the album opens with a pair of back-to-back instant McDowall classics in the form of “Out of Strength comes Sweetness” and “And Lions will Sing with Joy.” Apparently, their titles were “inspired by a liberatory hijacking and inversion of a grim biblical story (and by a cryptic and strange UK simple syrup branding),” while their aesthetic is described as an “electro-acoustic tapestry of strings, shudders, voids, and voices, alternately disembodied and displaced.”
In “Out of Strength comes Sweetness,” a languorous and bittersweet melody fitfully unfolds over a backdrop of ambient drone, but the melody leaves a long decay in its wake and McDowall works some characteristically beguiling textural sorcery on the central melody. It sounds a lot like plucked harmonics played on a massive stringed instrument, but the underlying drones gradually start to undergo a cool transformation as well, as the piece ultimately blossoms into a harmonically complex and enveloping dream-roar that sensuously heaves, smears, and undulates in sublime fashion.
The epic “And Lions will Sing with Joy,” on the other hand, opens with stuttering metallic plucks, billowing ambiance, and whines of feedback. At first, it seem like it is in danger of erring on the side of amorphous ambient drift, but it soon becomes brilliantly anchored by a ghostly and insistently repeating air raid swoop.
That hypnotic and eerie pulse then propels the piece into a crescendo best described as a howling, flanging, and spacy dreamscape before giving way to something resembling a gently psychedelic hammered dulcimer outro. I especially liked the moments that sounded like spacecrafts streaking through a futuristic city, but the whole piece feels gloriously like an intense psychedelic storm just blew through my fucking head with an accompaniment of submerged elemental howls. Nice work indeed.
Notably, I would expect the album’s second half to be a bit of a drop off after coming right out of the gate with twenty straight minutes of white-hot inspiration and that is indeed the case to some extent. However, McDowall still had enough cool ideas left in the tank to make this feel like a consistently strong album rather than just two killer tracks padded out with some lesser pieces.
For example, “In Wound and Water” is initially a bit of a meandering harp piece, but it gradually becomes enveloped by a swell of smeared drones with dark shadows and sharp edges. There are also some fitfully gorgeous glimpses of tumbling pointillist beauty as well as a lovely outro of rippling harp sweeps (which is definitely not something I was expecting to encounter on a Drew McDowall album).
The closing “A Dream of a Cartographic Membrane Dissolves” admittedly loses me a bit, as the epic strings, brooding chord progression, and choral bits are a bit too bombastic for my taste (they evoke something akin to a slow panning shot over a churning medieval battlefield), but the final minutes are quite beautiful, as the slowing delays of the rattling notes feel like a battalion of wind-up toys gradually freezing in place and sending their tiny souls heavenward. Not a bad way to end an album at all.
Unsurprisingly, the pessimist in me is tempted to lament that A Thread, Silvered and Trembling narrowly misses being a wall-to-wall stone-cold masterpiece, but the part of me that is less of an asshole is pretty fucking thrilled to encounter two more revelatory McDowall pieces so soon after being blown away by Magnetism (and in a very different direction as well). Drew McDowall’s work has rarely been as sacred-sounding and achingly beautiful as it is here.
Listen here.
