Blackwater Holylight – Not Here Not Gone (Suicide Squeeze Records) – There’s is a lush sound, a rich, a full bodied sound, dreamy at times, heavy at times, both together a lot of the time. Darkly psychedelic in a rather forward looking way,   Blackwater Holylight have carved themselves a heavy niche in the Los Angeles underground, following their arrival from Portland, Oregon. The hard rock trio say their new album is shaped by location change, that is “refining a strain of heavy, ethereal doom and shoegaze”.

The three women say they are “pondering the experience of being disembodied”, they’re doing this with lush moody riffs that build again and again to a collection of electric sometimes metallic climaxes. Full bodied rather than heavy; brooding, dark, extremely lush, velvety, light and dark maybe, that’s always been apart of what they do, this counterbalance of mood thing they sculpt so well. Not Here Not Gone is an easy listen, it is heavy, it has depth, it isn’t difficult to just have it playing away for hours at a time just for the pure enjoyment of it, it is an almost reassuring set of pieces of music, a warm enveloping thing, a pleasure you might say. All that isn’t to say Blackwater Holylight’s new album is shallow, that it lacks depth, far from it, there is a lot here, this is not heavy fluff, no no no, this is masterful, this had body and soul, more than enough depth here, this a rather fine rather heavy rather lush album, it kind of sounds like their album cover looks, rather like that cover…

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Blackwater Holylight UK dates

17 May – London – Desertfest 
18 May – Newcastle – The Cluny
19 May – Glasgow – Stereo
20 May – Manchester – The Deaf Institute