- Ashleigh Kerley often cops comparisons to Kim Gordon and, y’know, I get it. The breathy, sometimes deadpan delivery, completely unfazed by the out-of-control collapsing speaker stack of guitar noise overwhelming everything. To me though, the Marville frontwoman is, in an important way, the polar opposite. Where Kim Gordon and Sonic Youth are an intricately constructed style, a front, an ironic no-wave gesture, Ash Kerleigh and Marville are a complete lack of artifice, an honesty and immediacy that would probably terrify most of those affected no-wavers in its raw brutality.
That brutality is back in even greater force on the band’s second full-length, Terra Alpha. As a rule-of-thumb duos do tend to be louder than four pieces and Kerley and drummer pal Doug Palmer are certainly out to confirm that. The front half of the record is a wall of distortion, an unreconstructed wave of the hard-rocking ‘90s. It’s made especially obvious by the crispness that producer Joe Hammond brings to the output of her axe. At times I feel like the focus on the guitar overwhelms other priorities, but then it is pretty glorious, the seething, flaming heat of it all.
Dig down past the guitar and you’ll find the baleful heart of Kerley’s truths, being sneered out at some unseen opponent. The track here which encapsulates it, for me, is Fickle. The slow menacing strut of the intro is engulfed by the guitar over which you can just hear Ash muttering “You’ve been saying some things about me / Never thought you’d be so rude / You’ve got some nerve, I gotta tell ya / What the hell did you think you’d prove? / Next time I’ll choose my friends more wisely / Next time...” It falls somewhere between the kind of petulant confrontation you might have had in the school yard and an episode of Wentworth. I find it all too easy imagining Kerley bellowing “I don’t care!” and flying at someone with a shiv. It really does seem like the kind of dynamic you could only find in a the institutional, emotional pressure cooker of a boarding school or a prison, or a sharehouse, as explored on one of the record’s singles and I want to grab her by the arm and say, “hey, let it go, it’s not worth it; what are we fourteen again!?” She’s oblivious, however, reduced to a state of primal rage. It’s unnerving.
In this way Terra Alpha seems less circumspect than Marville’s first LP, Vayan Con Dios, like each song here is a bullet, ready to deliver a hot load of rage. Well, there’s a lot of that in the first half of the record. I do appreciate some of the less obvious moves that the band make as the album progresses. The by turns slow and languid and then seething blues-rock of Making Hay is a classic approach performed well. Immediately following it Speak Easy sounds like Dinosaur Jr. having a turn at shoegaze and dreampop. It’s an instant winner, easily the most inviting song amongst the spectrum of otherwise jagged and broken emotions on offer, although by its howling conclusion we’ve moved somewhere less friendly, more sludgy and metal.
It’s to Marville’s credit that I find it hard to draw comparisons between them and other bands who you think would be co-travellers but on closer inspection really aren’t very similar. They don’t sound anything like The Kills, that’s for sure. The speeding, reverse-White Stripes they pull on Steve however is quite recognisable and goddamn electric, a worthy chip off that old block. The tenderly exhausted sentiments of Enamoured, looking for a connection amidst the emotional wreckage are a welcome change of pace, even if genuine sweetness seems a bit beyond Kerley at this point. Marville keep the left-turns coming to the end: closer Mercy is flooded with gothic reverb, sounding like Chelsea Wolfe going down the gurgler with Thee Oh Sees; it’s an ominous, unsettling end to Terra Alpha. Perhaps that’s the right way for this misanthropic and -I’ll say it again- brutal record to go out.
Top heavy with anger and finger-jabbing accusations, like a terrifically destructive argument it’s had moments of epiphany and revelation, but at the conclusion you feel unsafe, uneven, wondering what the hell just happened. Since the first moment that Marville grabbed you by the shirt collar and spat in your face, it felt like being exposed to raw, unvarnished rage, like you were meant to know that you’d sowed the seeds of your own destruction, called down the thunder and reaped the whirlwind. If so, then mission accomplished.
- Chris Cobcroft.