The women in Blackwater Holylight make music that exists at the crossroads of metal, grunge, psychedelia, and shoegaze. Which means their latest album, Not Here Not Gone — which follows last year’s excellent If You Only Knew EP — is by turns heavy, intense, dreamy, haunting, and even sensual.
For proof of that, look no further than “Fade,” which opens with vaporous chords and Sunny Faris’s drifting vocals, suggesting a sort of Low meets Slowdive encounter. That is, until the distortion’s crunch kicks in and the drums begin pummeling away — though not in a manner that undoes the preceding lush-ness. Rather, the band finds a narrow ledge on which to stand, allowing them to keep the various extremes of their music coexistent, which only makes “Fade” — and by extension, the rest of Not Here Not Gone — all the more interesting.
Not Here Not Gone is now available on Suicide Squeeze Records.