- Gentle ambient meets shoegaze and noise on Headlock's remarkable new album.
- Lou DiBenedetto's first record in seven years begins with a roar and hardly up lets for the entire hour that follows. At first you think it's noise music, but that term doesn't really do justice to the layered feelings, sounds and intentions on Dragged Away, a record that sublimates grief into heart-rending, sometimes glorious catharsis. Taking the core of past Headlock records—slow, somber melodies that seem to sustain into infinity—and rubbing it raw, the LP is the aural equivalent of dousing beautiful paintings in acid. You can see glimmers of the original beauty, but the surface is pockmarked, mottled and irreparably damaged. Through ten stark, moving compositions, DiBenedetto uses this device to mourn the death of two friends, highlighting the unpredictable up-and-down nature of relationships with the wax and wane of harsh noise.
For most of its runtime, Dragged Away presents a wall of sound, as melodies alternate between gently unfurling and anxiously spiraling under a mass of static. It's hard, almost gritty music with a soft underbelly, offering several different ways in. You could appreciate it as one big wash of feeling, taking the distortion with the melody, or you could zero in and try and focus on those melodies as they circle, submerge and sometimes come up for air—like on "Suck," where it sounds like DiBenedetto is turning pressure release valves on and off, squeezing the synth melodies before letting them float freely.
At its best, like on "Trap," Dragged Away is like a heavily scuffed gem, with hints of blinding brightness gleaming between the crags and scratches. Picking out individual tracks doesn't seem like the point, though. Dragged Away works much better as a narrative whole than a set of discrete pieces. There's a clear arc, especially with the break in the storm clouds of "Gone," which follows the title track with a tantalizing glimpse of pure, burnished melody, before things go back to the abrasive, sandpaper textures of tracks like "Wave."
These contradictions, and the push-and-pull between extremes, mirror both the process of mourning and the self-evaluation that comes with it—those times when you play back the good moments with the bad, balancing regret with nostalgia. There have been several great electronic albums about mourning this year already, but this mix of peace, tumult and anger on Dragged Away feels unusually poignant. It's an ambient record that manages to be ugly and beautiful at the same time, and it'll probably register different ways to different people. For some an elegant elegy, for others a punishing gauntlet of difficult frequencies.
In this way, Dragged Away really does mirror the life and death of interpersonal relationships. No one person sees things the same way, and in the throes of passion, everything can become distorted into one ball of rage, confusion or sadness, where feelings and emotions become muddled. Dragged Away feels like a snapshot of these moments, of moods and crises in miniature, all blown out to extreme proportions where paradoxes live side by side. In other words, it's an album that feels true to life, finding deep, sometimes uncomfortable meaning in the complexities of both sound and perception.
Tracklist01. Sun
02. Suck
03. Trap
04. Break
05. Dragged Away
06. Gone
07. Remnant
08. Sky
09. Wave
10. Dream