Seemingly ordained by the structure and archwork of music's ontological firmament, not even the end of the world as we knew it could forestall the emergence of such a gambit of existential reckoning. As it is the will of a wheel to turn, so too it was the will of protean dark-kin emissary Emma Ruth Rundle and the Malebranche sludge vanguard Thou to spin the sticky silk of their head-wombs into an ethereal tapestry both fantastic and foul to behold. This manifestation of their demiurgic projections is the new opus May Our Chambers Be Full, released from its forming cask by the preeminent soothsayers and diviners of marrow dust of the House of Sacred Bones.
May Our Chambers Be Full owes its genesis to a collaborative performance that Rundle and Thou conjured and then extricated during the latter's residency at the Roadburn Festival in 2019. Once unbridled, the spirit of that performance disentangled itself from the temporal limitations of its birthing chamber and spread out across the ocean to billowed through the sky-ripping monoliths, desolate asphalte lakes, low-hanging skies, and forests whose canopies are formed by overlapping and swollenly inflated egos of dwarven kings- the worm-eaten fabric of the United States. In many ways, the album feels like the emergence of something young and wild, and in otherways, it is like the cold kiss of a vengeful promise kept.
Thou demonstrated at various turns throughout this current epoch of morbidity that there was a certain, enlightened idiopathy to the vibrating electric sinuous and amplified wind and wales that preoccupied the fitful dreams of unmoored youth in the twilight years of the Gipper's sanctimonious scourage. A truth they bore as a golden cross upon their shoulders, 7 pes in length and 3/16 pes wide, on Blessings of the Highest Order. A glimmering display of bone bowing, spleen rupturing, first-order alethic revelation. the kind of truth that could crush you like an insect. In finding Nirvana they revealed that there is a mystic depth to the plunging, inward intrusions that Cobain and others attained... at the price of their sanity. This costly pay dirt is the motor of May Our Chambers Be Full, building a twisted maze of the mind, where wanderers lost inside must loop their finger between the links in a chain that strains around the edges and geometry vine-draped edifices of that place and heave at its steeling length in the hopes of opening a distent gate. A task weighted with the angst of fate. For there is a chance of peril that the wanderers are asked to absorb without fear, they are gambling that the chains they grip and pull are not the leash of a great two-headed dog. A beast that speaks with the voice of an angel and the croak of a dead man. Could one will to survive a confrontation with such a monstrosity? Or, should their resolve fault, shall they be devoured? If death were to befall them they will find themselves taking on a new life, their spirit cursed to walk the stones and thorns of the paths and corridors of their entrapment, bleached by the sun and burnt by the cold, until the troths of their tomb are filled in and forgotten by time, and them along with it.
Leaving that trap, that loathsome place of want, may be the greater sorrow though. As the echos of one's tribulation will dog the escapee forever. A recurrent nightfall of the soul perpetually descending, coinciding with impressions of teeth marks slowly deepening around the heels, tagging the former wanderer as prey. Markings left by an apparition that recalls what has been forced out of the mind in a vain act of ideological preservation. A notion that reluctantly churns in the pit of the self like a whirlpool of pitch and burning sulfur, always rising, threatening to perspire through the vail of the real and conscious mind. An apocalyptic excellent, gurgling forth from one's essence. A hateful truth pried out of the grave dirt of lessons learned and petulantly abandoned. A thought like a wheezing, panicked breath sucked through the fraying folds of a wicker mask before one is plunged into the ocean. This epiphany? That despite one's striving, despite one's arrogant lust for satiation, one's chambers are never more barren than when they are at their fullest.
