03/05/2025
New Tapes in the Shop:
Having played support to the likes of Gnod, MONO and Damo Suzuki of Can, the
unpigeonholeable craft of Belfast th*****me Unbelievable Lake orbits around an
aleatoric, second-nature savvy that could only ever come into being via countless hours in a rural attic-space, exploring music as a single entity.
Doubling up as a 43-minute through-line via influences as mottled as OM, Scott Walker, Swans and Tangerine Dream, the band’s debut LP, Forgive, emphatically distills that trajectory thus far.
Recorded mostly live - spare a few overdubs - by producer Niall Doran at the rural St. Matthias‘ Church in Ballyeglish, Co. Derry, the cyclical rhythms and weighty, widescreen drones that define the release feel equal parts towering and scopic: like a leering monolith depicted on an unfurling tapestry. Peering beyond the veil, far into the internal machinations of anxiety, fear and paranoia, as well as contrasts in rural and urban life and the isolation inherent in each, it is both a meditation on death and a freely-developing fever dream that dwells in various times & spaces.
With guitarist and lyricist Stevie Lennox feeling compelled to rewrite his lyrics after burying his grandmother in the same church a few months after recording, Forgive is a release equally concerned with heeding the sway of metamorphosis and “the weird ruminative acceptance of one’s fate in the end”, as Lennox puts it. By guiding thoughts on isolation, post-Irish conflict liminality and the spectres of urban decay via a sonic M.O bearing the imprint of Sleep and Earth every bit as much as Pauline Oliveros and Neil Young’s more experimental efforts, Forgive is feature-length testament to filtering deliverance through the dread.
