Back in the 1880s, magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin used to stun his audiences with a trick he called “The Marvelous Orange Tree.” It was all very complicated, but, in the end, resulted in a lady’s handkerchief bursting out of the titular plant, held aloft by butterflies. There’s also fire involved. “The Marvelous Orange Tree” is the title of the last track on the latest (and best) album from endlessly inventive metal band Deafheaven, and it perfectly sums up their magic-trick mix of raw aggression, painterly lyrics, and earworm melodies. Lonely People With Power is an ambitious and oddly gorgeous suite of 12 tracks, vacillating between aching isolation, introspective rage, and a flitting beauty reminiscent of those citrus-born butterflies.
Over the years, Deafheaven has careened between polarities — from the absolutely enormous roar of their 2013 breakout Sunbather, to the shoegazey clean vocals on the somewhat controversial (at least to metal purists) Infinite Granite, produced by Justin Meldal-Johnsen (Beck, NIN, St. Vincent). Over the course of 15 years, though, the band has never settled into a worn-out groove. Lonely People, then, is a kind of culmination of a decade and a half of innovation — a mixing and merging of melody and metal, pain and poetry. As frontman George Clarke said recently: “In the last decade, we made Sunbather and then it was like, ‘We’re not just this, we’re this.’ And we made New Bermuda. And it’s like, ‘We’re not just this, we’re this,’ and so on. There was always an effort to challenge ourselves, whereas with this one, there was actually a real comfort in looking back and feeling established in our own sound.”
In many ways, the record moves like the acts in a play — songs flowing into each other, interspersed with tracks titled “Incidental I,” “II,” and “III,” which act as a kind of burgeoning framework for the pain, pleasure, and loneliness inherent in every movement. “Incidental I” is a droning wisp of a song, reminiscent of whale calls, while “Incidental II” adds Jae Matthews (singer for the electro band Boy Harsher singer) to the drone, singing, as if in agony, “I think I might be hiding from myself.” The third “Incidental III” recalls mysterious transmissions from space, with Interpol’s Paul Banks’ honeyed speaking voice asking, “Are you ever alone?”
That theme — loneliness, connection — thrums throughout the record, which Clarke says was influenced by, per the LP’s title, powerful people who are by default lonely — by, as he puts it, “loneliness as a spiritual vacancy.” Some songs react to that isolation with ferocity — take “Doberman,” which has as much bite as its title and finds us at the center of a panopticon, seen by all but always on our own. Or “Revelator,” which comes in hot on a wave of rage as Clarke screams: “Isolate every waking day/Hiding from self while loathing grows.” Then there are moments that explore more conventionally masculine rage, like the one that festers between fathers and sons (the blazing “Magnolia,” which touches on Clarke’s father’s death), and “Body Behavior,” where dumb, fun guitars clash perfectly with galling lyrics about a father showing his son porn because he “wants to know my type.”
Still, here’s a membrane of beauty that holds the whole album together — be it the shimmery couples road-trip romp on “The Garden Route,” or “Heathen,” which transitions from eerie choral trilling to an ode to commitment issues that, quite strikingly, features clean vocals on the verses, screams on the chorus. And then there’s “Amethyst,” a standout that sounds like the Cocteau Twins being torn limb from limb as Clarke murmurs about the “lunar studded starscapes” of God’s realm.
It’s the transition between the final two tracks, though, that haunts the most. “Winona” is a howling hole, a seven-plus-minute opus that’s as big as the opening scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It ends, though, with the sound of trickling water, which winds like a stream into “The Marvelous Orange Tree,” a song about suicide that instead sounds like rebirth. Like a butterfly from a fruit pit — a fluttering piece of silk from the flame.