Eartheater’s new album, Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin, is a powerful mix of intimacy and vulnerability - a longing for feeling and knowledge that overpowers reason and drives towards destruction and rebirth.
Sonically, Eartheater moves elegantly between traditional instrumentation and a chopped up electronic soundscape. One great example of this is the transition between “Below The Clavicle,” which at its foundation has a sort of wandering harp melody backed up by strummed guitar, layered with swelling strings, and “Burning Feather,” a song built on distorted vocal chops, scattered synthetic noise, and bitcrushed screams. Despite the sharp tonal differences, these songs feel perfectly at home next to each other.
These transitions occur throughout the album and flow into each other. “How To Fight” contains traces of the chopped up vocals of “Burning Feather”; “Kiss of the Phoenix” pairs its uncomfortable distorted soundscape with the sweeping beauty of the harp heard in earlier compositions. You can trace the lines from the start to the finish - despite the clash of sounds nothing feels out of place or unintentional.
The compositional approaches mirror the themes of Phoenix - a collision is at the heart of the album. The earth moves, changes, and flows - volcanoes erupt, plates smash together to create mountains. Tectonic smashing and colliding, the forming of the earth, the reforming of foundations - maybe through this destructive collision we find something new in ourselves and thus are reborn through physical acquisition of knowledge. The titular phoenix rises from a foundational self-destruction that is both violent and beautiful.
The lyrics and tone of the album communicate a powerful feeling of longing for touch, but also a sadness, a fear of the change that this physicality can bring. In “Airborne Ashes” we hear the refrain “the only way out is through . . . born out, born out of it.” “Below The Clavicle” feels like it’s reaching out, grasping for touch, yearning for a knowledge that only the body can find. In “How To Fight” we reach some sense of triumph, but it’s still reserved, like there is a worry that the sought-after rebirth can be lost. In “Diamond In The Bedrock” there is a sense that something has been learned through the pressure and calamity, but there’s also a feeling of at what cost?
It’s not until the final track, “Faith Consuming Hope,” that it feels like our narrator has come to any sort of peace, but even this final peace is uneasy. We repeat, “The only way out is through . . . born out, born out of it”; we hear “hope has a leak for doubt to seep in . . . faith has no doubt.” A death, a rebirth, and something new, exciting but unknown and unsure.
Eartheater is a New York based multi-instrumentalist. Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin is available now through PAN.