Review Summary: ...until there's no nail left
Jessica Knight sings like there’s a hand around her throat, pushing out the notes with urgency, like she’s making use of her last breaths to impart everything she’s ever been too afraid to say. Indeed, this record seems to be blueprinted by the kind of regret that pushes to the surface on a deathbed (listen to
Linear Lies’ refrain). It’s ironic, then, that this thing sounds like it’s hyperventilating, pivoting desperately as its own mind closes in around it. It’s obnoxiously animated, with its splintering guitars and forward momentum. Evidently,
Nailbiter is probably the most befitting title for this album: short, sharp and inconsolably high-strung.
Nailbiter is a maze of disintegrated nerve-endings, and Looming drop themselves in the middle. Turning herself inside out, Knight dances around the stuttering drumbeat in
Cotton Tongue, and by
Output, she’s clutching onto that hounding high-hat to save herself as the instrumentation drops out from underneath her. There are several instances in which I can feel the stark disconnect, where the vocals remain fleet-footed while the music aggressively kicks up dust behind them, crashing through ceilings, toppling over shelves full of valuable sh
it just to watch it all break. It emphasises a range of dissociations that this record represents, irrespective of whether the band intended to represent them.
I don’t think that
Nailbiter is a concept album, it feels too transitory; too oppressed by its own psyche. It’s a surprisingly considered piece of indie rock, though, and there exists a narrative-like sequencing that’s revealed by the continuity of certain lyrics, as if a connect-the-dots has been interred under all the drum fills and distorted guitar riffs. In
Cotton Tongue, Knight sings:
“Do you hold your breath when your eyes meet mine?” and then opens
Onward, the next track, with
“You’ve got your back turned”, almost answering her own question before pinning the dynamic on an undefined internal conflict.
Strive, lyrically, is the response to that mutual divide. And so it goes.
It’s not really clear where this anxiety and distrust ends or begins, though. In
Eat, it’s difficult to tell whether Knight is indignant with herself or someone else as she opines
“the heart lies, and the head plays tricks”, although it’s significantly easier to surmise that she’s at the very least confused. It’s consolidated by the next track,
New Eyes, where she pines for a clearer perspective; an unclouded lens with which to scrutinise a spider’s web of relationships and circumstances. I think that – by the final track – Knight finally pinpoints her bruised internal alcoves. As the song marches slowly to the end of the rope and the band props her up on their shoulders, she repeats like a mantra:
“the worst that can happen, is that all will stay the same”. The silence that follows the end of this record feels like the beginning of a convalescence, one that was completely dependent on some kind of explosion (these songs do explode, too. Listen to
Intro) to clear the debris blocking the endpoint.
All this to say, I guess, that change is a beautiful and utterly important thing, and Looming spends this entire album making that unequivocally clear. People always say that the first step to fixing a problem is recognising you have one, so let me help - yours is that you haven’t heard
Nailbiter yet.
