- I sometimes feel myself drifting away with Cyanide Thornton, inside the cloud in which they live. Does that make them less intense than their sibling outfit, Two Steps On The Water? I don’t know about that. I will admit this isn’t ferocious folk music any more; you can tell that right from the loping interplay of the bass and guitar on opener, Weight. Lightly psychedelic in an almost krautrock loop that sounds more like The Velvet Underground, I can’t say this is any less in-your-face though. Quite literally, I suppose, as Sienna Thornton’s guitar crows suddenly, wildly and she sings a soft but forceful ode to oral sex: “with the rage with the fury with the conductors / Hey! / I forget, I forget … to taste you, spread out on the couch.” The band’s debut, self-titled full-length is a clutch of unconventional love songs and sometimes they arrive, slow as a drifting cloud of smoke. You’d be wrong to think of them as easy-going though, Mac Demarco this ain’t. They’ve just shifted into low gear, for the long haul and the slow burn.
The record immediately comes as close as it ever does to dispelling anything at all relaxed, in the cold and lacerating #metoo anthem I Can’t Hear It. It’s still inflammatory psych-blues and is a bit elliptical in the telling, but maybe that’s the only way it could be done. “Well it’s you my darling, it’s the clothes your wearing, it’s the words you’re using and it’s the age you’re turning / Well it comes hard and it comes fast and knows no boundaries.”
Frayed nerves are soothed by the long, sparse but smooth phrases of Violin Song. Slow but smouldering lustfully and singing about sweaty backs, the violin wails in a climax that draws back toward the Two Steps fold. The album’s other single to date, Hot Air, forges off in still another direction. The mid-tempo guitar is positively sunny and Sienna does her best Courtney Barnett impression, wryly sing-speaking her way through ironic anecdotes about the little foibles which beset relationships. Fairly often it self-medicates its way beyond mundane cares: “and I was hot air, my meeting a mirage on an open plain and it felt like an accident, but an accident in a good way, like I was in a movie or on an aeroplane / Speaking of aeroplanes, yes, I like get high...” That’s pleasant enough, but the real paydirt is in the song’s coda, reached via a long guitar solo that’s pretty neat in itself but not as good as the beautifully optimistic burst of close vocal harmony that comes next: like Angel Olsen just left Will Oldham’s band and went suddenly, spectacularly solo.
Rotten Tooth unravels into that same slow sparseness we’ve heard before, but if the last love song was sweet this one’s a mean drunk. Call me crazy but there’s something a bit like Gareth Liddiard and The Drones as things gain momentum, flaring into a triumphant brokenness. It capers unevenly and contemptuously, spitting the lyrics and glaring at you, daring you to say something about the whole display. There's a sort of admission as much in the tremulous, closing couplets and the now whispered refrain: "sometimes gravity's my enemy..." yeah this might be one of those times. Pilot Light teases out more of that vulnerability. It's slow and six-eight again, but we're at a very different stage of grieving when Thorton quietly croons "I see the colour of your hair in every fallen autumn leaf." David Pesavento contributes a lovely baritone to the reprise of the chorus, just at the end. He continues that into the otherwise quite disparate sound of the album's closing epic, Heavy And Wide. At a slow but slightly funky gait it's got an unsettling, slightly noirish narration, interspersed with haunting guitar licks. That unfolds with the relaxed jaunt of a Robert Altman movie, but before long abandons words altogether, playing out a gentle and unexpectedly moving benediction on guitar, for a man named Kev.
Cyanide Thornton can sound like a bunch of inveterate stoners, but they’re much more than that. This clutch of songs is surprisingly considered and I often feel a bit disoriented, a bit out-of-my-skull myself, when their next unexpected move comes drifting out of the haze. They come in slow, but when they hits home, they’re all the more devastating because of it. Yep, they’ve got those moves for days and I feel like I could have drifted away with this record forever.
- Chris Cobcroft.