Review

Plague of Carcosa, Pale Light and Sunless Water

HP Lovecraft has exerted an influence far beyond weird fiction including, unsurprisingly, in music. Lovecraftian mythos is often invoked in metal, usually as a superficial substitute for ersatz Satanism, or some other form of revisionist occultism, to indicate facile antinomianism.1 But Lovecraft’s vision of an indifferent cosmic void that conclusively establishes the insignificance of human life is difficult, if not impossible, to capture in linear fashion though lyrics. This existential sense of insignificance undermines even HPL’s well-attested rampant racism.2 In his stories language starts to breakdown when the protagonists are confronted by alterity, resorting to chimerical descriptions of animalistic bodies and non-Euclidean spaces. Such encounters are best captured affectively in sound.

Plague of Carcosa are a self-proclaimed “doomnoise” duo from Chicago who have been releasing music since 2016. Pale Light and Sunless Waters comprises of three tracks of pure Lovecraftian gloom that explores the fertile territory between doom/sludge and more experimental sounds composed of droning distorted, modulating tones played by downtuned guitar and rhythmically textural drums. The sounds on the three tracks move from the subterranean chthonic (“The Seventh House”), to slithering aquatic amphibiousness (“Things Have Learnt to Walk That Ought to Crawl”), concluding with a buzzing, vaporous atmospheric swarm (“Lights Over the Lake”). If this sounds depressing, trust me that’s not the case. It’s a kind of negative epiphany that can’t be articulated, only experienced. Listen and accept the void.

1 There are, of course, exceptions, notably Blut Aus Nord’s ethereal liquid metal.

2 Such weird realism, and/or, perhaps, transcendental nihilism, is why his writing has also appealed to philosophers.