I do appreciate it when a shoegaze band gets it right. And when I say that they get it right, I mean that they actually inaugurate a sense of place and dimensional presence in their music. It's so easy, x ∞, to just lean into an effects pedal and let the distension of distortion that expands out from a struck chord do the set dressing for your music for you, but Denver's Ratstallion are not leaving such essential details to mechanical happenstance. Their debut EP Sisyphus Happy sounds like it's risen from the depths of Erebus, seeping up like steam through the cracks in the Earth, and greeting you like a mirage in the forest- a trick of the eye piercing the senses in the dusky shade of an evening's gloom. The six-song release teeters in a balancing act between bright apparitions and scorched floodplains that snare you in a gale of riveting corporal catharsis. Angelic vocals skim with fluid grace over the icy contours of palpably dense distortion, which maps the refined tissue of the chord progressions like a suit of armor around the corpus of a knight- these lithe vocals playfully preserving themselves against the imposing mass of an unfeeling exterior until the tension builds into a rapturous outburst of purgative convulsions, one where all sensitive follicles have hardened to quills and the nausea brought on by the dance of its existence has achingly roiled to its angsty pinnacle, like froth dripping over the brim of a boiling pot. Some specters you see, others you hear, still others creep through your bones, gripping your frame and persuasively conducting you to a realm of dark illumination, where you can discover happiness in release from the ambient torment of the quotidian.
