It's not often that we review music albums on this site, but it's not often that records of the quality of Anna von Hausswolff's Dead Magic come along. In fact, the last time we reviewed an individual album here, it was Quilt's 2016 record Plaza.
By my count, the 21st Century has so far seen the release of maybe a dozen masterpiece records, true works of art that would stand the test of time, if, that is, they ever get discovered in the first place. In addition to Plaza, I would add Animal Collective's Sung Tongs, Swans' To Be Kind, and Silver Mt. Zion's Horses In The Sky. There were other great records, sure, but Anna just set the bar pretty damn high for everyone else.
von Hausswolff is a Swedish organist and singer, who also occasionally plays some guitar. Her specialty, though, is playing big pipe organs, and she apparently loves nothing more that jamming out on a church organ and exploring the resonance of the cathedral while pushing the organ past the limits of its capabilities. She's been recording since at least 2010 and has released four albums before Dead Magic, but it's with Magic that she's really come into her own.
So let's break Dead Magic down: the album opens with a 12-minute composition The Truth, The Glow, The Fall. The song opens with a lovely, almost droning intro, with Anna intoning "After the fall, after the fall, after the fall, I'll find you." After about three and a half minutes of that, she finds a pulsating beat on the organ, which propels the song into its second movement which contains even more powerful vocals from von Hausswolff. But eventually, this passage ends and fades into a near ambient drone, strings that are playing no particular melody but just shimmering in mid air, until the undertones start to come up from beneath the surface and bring the piece to an unexpected crescendo. So right there, we have a three-movement composition, each corresponding to one part or another of the title The Truth, The Glow, The Fall, and it covers everything from gothic folk to ambient to drone, and all that's just on the first track of the album alone.
The second track, The Mysterious Vanishing of Electra, is nothing short of a doom metal masterpiece. I've posted it here before, and there's a live version posted above. This is probably the album's defining song and by most measures the best song on the record. It might become von Hausswolff's signature piece, to her what My Girls is to Animal Collective. I've already listened to it countless times and even though I still don't know what it's about, at least in a literal sense, there's no mistaking the emotion in Anna's vocals. To this day, I still get goosebumps on my arms when she shrieks "Who is she? Who is she? Who is she?" near the end.
Following up on that track would not be an easy task for anyone, but von Hausswolff pulls it off with Ugly and Vengeful. This is another long track, a post-rock exploration that sounds like it would fit right in on Swans' To Be Kind or The Glowing Man. There's a lot going on but it roughly breaks down into two general sections, a slow but intense first half of gothic organ riffs and vocals that slowly builds up to a dramatic crescendo, which sets the stage for the rhythmic second section. The moment the drums finally kick in around the 10:00-minute mark is nothing short of thrilling, and Anna's vocals ride along on the ensuing waves of rhythm like she were on horseback (which for all I know, she might be). The 16-plus minute piece is an emotional and satisfying tour de force of post-rock that stands right up to anything Swans or Godspeed ever recorded. It's possible that the title Ugly and Vengeful is actually dual and refers to the two major passages of the piece, like The Truth, etc. refers to the three parts of Track 1, but the first part is hardly Ugly and contains some of Anna's most beautiful vocals on the record, although Vengeful might fit the aggressive second half.
The next two tracks are also quite lovely but don't quite reach the thrilling highs of Electra and Ugly and Vengeful. The Marble Eye is one of von Hausswolff's pipe organ exercises, an interesting and beautiful piece that borders on the best minimalism but lacks the emotional catharsis of the three previous tracks. You'd think she was saving her final punch for the closing track, Källans återuppståndelse, a name that sounds right out of the Chelsea Wolfe songbook, but that piece is another pipe organ exercise, but this time with vocals. The last two cuts are good, no doubt there, but if I were producing the album, I'd have made them the first two tracks to build up to the 1-2-3 punches of The Truth, Electra, and Ugly and Vengeful. And isn't that the beauty of iPods and streaming services - we can now listen to the tracks in whatever order we want and aren't bound by the decisions of the producers and the record label.
Speaking of which, I feel compelled to point out that Dead Magic was released on City Slang records, and is available on their web site, Amazon, iTunes or wherever fine music is being sold. Go check it out!
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