Darling Chemicalia Releases Album Number Three, Spun in White

The word “evolution” implies not just adaptation to a changing environment, but also alludes to the increasing complexity of an organism. Local band Darling Chemicalia has been a fixture of the Sacramento live music scene for several years now, and they’ve reshaped, compounded in intricacy and proven their fitness to potential mates (you, the listener and showgoer) with the creation of their third record. Spun in White makes its official emergence in March.

Spun in White is the first Darling Chemicalia effort being put out by a record label— New York’s A Wicked Company. They recorded it themselves at their practice space, House of Hits, on Marconi. It showcases what the band is like live, and exhibits the new additions since Darling Chemicalia’s first two records, Valleys and Ghost Sketch, which were self-recorded by Ian Bone (vocals, guitar), Stephine Bone (vocals, keyboard) and Justin Gonzo (drums). Andrew Henderson (also in the totally rad band G. Green) lends a second guitar, and ex G. Green member Michael Feerick adds bass to the new record and evolution of Darling Chemicalia.

The 11 tracks that comprise Spun in White are each distinct from the last and catchier than a motherfucker upon repeated listens. The songs are spun together into an insidiously inviting web by common threads: youthful post-punk melodies; low-fi yet complex layered soundscapes; energizing pop influence; a dreamy underwater quality; Ian’s shaky, desperate vocals and Stephine’s raw, urgent, and longing vocals. Though they’ve preciously been compared to My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth, for me, Built to Spill qualities were immediately recognized when I first heard track one, “Final Girl.”

The album name comes from a Charles Bukowski poem, an excerpt of which reads:

“… And then the spider from his dank hole
nervous and exposed
the puff of body swelling
hanging there
not really quite knowing,
and then knowing—
something sending it down its string,
the wet web,
toward the weak shield of buzzing,
the pulsing;
a last desperate moving hair-leg
there against the glass
there alive in the sun,
spun in white;
and almost like love:
the closing over,
the first spider-sucking:
filling its sack
upon this thing that lived…”

As you can probably extrapolate from the tone of the poem above, the album is dark, and as Henderson described, “Claustrophobic—so much going on all the time in most of the songs… It’s what you’d feel like if you were in a crawl space and someone’s banging on the floor above you, but it’s good.” Henderson’s manner and voice reminded me of Mordecai from Regular Show. 

It’s decidedly a loud, rocking record. Explains Ian Bone, “Growing up, I was super into Nirvana, and I never tried to do something like that. This doesn’t sound like Nirvana, but it’s as close as we can come to sounding like Nirvana. When you’re young, you get one record and obsess over it, immerse yourself in it. We don’t play a lot of shows where there are teenagers, and I want to know where the teenagers are. Because I wanted to make a record where some kid somewhere would listen to it and get obsessed. Actually listen to it all the way through.”

There’s so much going on musically in spite of managing to maintain minimalism, that it requires listening to it over and over again to really capture all of the things. Kind of like watching The Big Lebowski—no matter how many times I rewatch that movie, I catch some nuance in the dialogue that I’d never picked up on before, which makes it superior to a work that can be absorbed in one sitting. 

“We’ve exhausted every melodic possibility for each song,” adds Ian, and while that’s mathematically improbable, the record is full of sound.

“Maybe we need to add a horn or something,” Henderson says jokingly.

“Yeah, that’s the next step,” concurs Ian sarcastically.

“We’ll make a ska record,” quips Gonzo.

Band dynamics will make or break even the most skilled group of musicians, and Darling Chemicalia is a tightknit alliance possessing pretty damn cute dynamics and dexterity to boot. In the beginning, it was just Gonzo, Ian and Stephine (the latter two had a baby three years ago). They added a guitarist momentarily but she didn’t work out.

One night in December 2012, when longtime homies Henderson and Feerick were going in on some booze with Gonzo and the Bones, Ian declared, “You should come join our band.” And so it was decided.

“It’s cool that we’re a band that is just friends anyway, and we’ve just become better friends,” Henderson elaborates. “We just like to play music together. We all look forward to band practice because we get to hang out with each other.” That camaraderie is palpable in the new record.

They rehearse once a week, randomly intersperse local shows, and on occasion venture out to San Francisco to perform. Their songwriting process varies. Ian brings ideas to the table half of the time, and as far as the other half goes, they’ll just be jamming at the beginning of practice and something worth exploring further arises. It took about a year to write the new record, and a year to record it—this was no haphazard process, but a painstaking and methodical one. 

The album cover artwork for Spun in White is on par with the quality of the record itself. For the previous two albums, they utilized found photos, which are very cool images, but the new one was the first thing they actually did where it was a bit more premeditated.

“After we got married, Ian grabbed me and some residual wedding stuff…,” Stephanie Bone starts to explain.

“That sounds like a sexual thing, ‘it was our wedding night…’” teases Henderson.

“It wasn’t our wedding night, it was after we got married,” she clarifies.

The resulting picture is a beautiful, haunting image of a woman, spun in white, in itself a work of art.

Lofty future goals for the band? Define lofty…

“I’m still stoked every month that goes by that we’re all still doing this,” Ian says. “I don’t have any delusions of grandeur that we’ll be on the cover of the Rolling Stone or anything like that… if we can keep making something that’s good, as long as all of us are interested in doing it, then that’s good enough.”

“We’re finally going to go play in the Northwest, and that’s a huge step for this band,” adds Gonzo. 

I disagree. Maybe they won’t get richer, or get their picture on the cover of the Rolling Stone, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this band is asked to play festivals like SXSW within the next couple of years, or is at least pleasantly surprised by a wealth of affirming, great reviews by notable music publications—not unlike this review.

Catch Darling Chemicalia at Witch Room’s first show on Tuesday, March 25 with Wax Idols, Wreck And Reference, So Stressed and Hollow Sunshine. Starts at 8 p.m., $8 cover, 18-and-over. Witch Room is located at 1815 19th Street (Bows and Arrows’ old space). For more information, visit Witchroomsac.com.

Chelsea Wolfe’s The Grime and the Glow dresses folk music in a black cloak

Ravens perched on bare branches, snow falling on tombstones, wooden shutters clattering against cloudy window panes in a strong gale–these are just some of the visuals The Grime and the Glow, the latest fulllength album from Sacramento songwriter Chelsea Wolfe, may conjure in the imagination of the listener. Songs such as “Cousins of the Antichrist,” on which Wolfe intones “All in vain” in a steady refrain as the song ends, reinforce descriptions of her music as dark or goth folk. Wolfe herself describes another selection from the album, “Halfsleeper,” as “a slow-motion painting of what it’s like to die in a car accident with your loved one.” Wolfe, however, admits that The Grime and the Glow isn’t necessarily all doom and gloom–not that she’d mind if it were. She says that songs “Advice & Vices” and “The Whys” are more playful lyrically than she’d normally write. Wolfe describes the latter as “a song making fun of myself for taking everything so seriously.” But these concessions aren’t in hopes of lightening the album’s dark mood.

“I don’t mind it getting too dire,” Wolfe says in a recent interview with Submerge.

From the album cover, to the videos made for the songs, to the music itself, The Grime and the Glow seems born from a single cohesive vision. Wolfe says that the theme for the album came to her once its title was in place. She says the title is taken from the introduction to the novel Death on the Installment Plan, by French author Louis-Ferdinand Celine. The darkly humorous novel had quite an effect on Wolfe, even though she wasn’t able to finish it.

“I…read most of [it], but had to stop because of the dark place it puts my head space,” she explains. “I didn’t really need to dig any deeper into understanding that much of the beauty in the world is crawling with worms beneath the surface.”

To get the dark and distant sound that permeates the album, Wolfe took a much more stripped down approach compared to that of her previous release, Soundtrack VHS/Gold. For that album, Wolfe says she went into a nice studio in order to create a “tapenoise- sounding” album, but she “eventually realized how illogical that was.”

“It’s a very different album,” Wolfe says of her previous effort. “I wanted to get an eight-track sounding record in a nice studio. Didn’t make any sense, but we did mix it down to tape.”

Wolfe says she wasn’t unhappy with the results, but instead with the lengthy recording process leading up to the release of Soundtrack VHS/Gold, which was released in an extremely limited run of about 50 CDs on Chicago-based indie label Jeune Été Records.

This time, Wolfe took a more “logical” approach to making an eight-track sounding album by using an actual eight-track machine. The Grime and the Glow was recorded by Wolfe on a Tascam 488, a handme- down from her musician father, that she says she’s recorded on for years. Wolfe says that doing the album herself, on a familiar machine, “made it sound exactly the strange and special fucked up way I wanted it to sound.”

Strange and fucked up are excellent adjectives for The Grime and the Glow. Though the mood is consistently dark, songs range from the wildly dissonant “Deep Talks,” which grates Wolfe’s bittersweet voice through layers of noise, to the aforementioned “Advice & Vices,” a catchy piece of dark pop that’s as tuneful as it is morose–and she sure doesn’t skimp on the reverb.

“I also like clean, straightforward vocals sometimes and will experiment with that someday,” Wolfe says, “But for these songs I wanted to capture my voice or the instruments, whatever, inside a certain soundbox, so when you have your headphones on listening to it you feel like you’re in a tiny, claustrophobic echoroom or a parking garage cathedral.”

Adding to the eerie, almost antique sound of the songs is the album’s format. The Grime and the Glow will be released some time in June–pushed back from the original May 18 release date–on limited edition vinyl by New York-based label Pendu Sound. Wolfe says that it was the label’s decision to release the album on vinyl, but it’s a decision she’s happy with.

“I don’t think this album would work as solely a CD release,” Wolfe says.

In addition to the music, Wolfe has also been busy working on visual companions to the songs. The Pendu Sound Web site for The Grime and the Glow features a series of four videos created for “Advice & Vices,” “Moses,” “The Whys” (featuring camera work by local horror filmmaker Jason Rudy) and “Bounce House Demons.” The videos for “Moses” and “Bounce House Demons” star Wolfe’s friend, writer Jessalyn Wakefield, whom Wolfe calls, “a perfect visual muse.” At the time of our interview, Wolfe also mentioned that she was working on a video for the song “Widow,” which will feature a “goth-glam girl lip-synching the song in a dark studio.”

“I like the element of darkness mixed with a bit of silliness,” she says.

This mix of music and film comes as no surprise as Wolfe states that movies had a big influence on her in the making of The Grime and the Glow.

“The Seventh Seal is my long-time favorite film,” says Wolfe, who also listed David Lynch’s Eraserhead and Jean Rollin’s French vampire movies as sources for inspiration. “The character of death in that film has forever been an influence in my creative life. Ingmar Bergman in general is a big inspiration for me. The portrayal of life in his films is so honest and desolate but rich at the same time. Another favorite is The American Astronaut (Cory McAbee), a dark space-western with hand-painted special effects and a pretty low budget that manages to get such a defined feel across, haunting but still silly, like so much of the folk art I love.”

In fact, Wolfe finds inspiration from most forms of art–but not so much with other music.

“Throughout my life and for this album I’ve been very inspired by authors, poets, painters and filmmakers, more so I’d say than any band or musician,” she explains. “In fact, for many years I wouldn’t allow myself to listen to music because I didn’t want to infuse anyone else’s sound into my own–I wanted to see what would happen without that influence.”

The Grime and the Glow is a solo project, but it was still a collaborative effort. Andrew Henderson of G.Green, Ian Bone from Darling Chemicalia and Ruven Reveles all made appearances on the album. Kevin Dockter, Drew Walker and Addison Quarles (collectively known as The Death) and Ben C. also played parts and have come together to form Wolfe’s band. Wolfe, Dockter, Walker, Quarles and C. will be heading into a proper studio in June to record a fivesong EP. Wolfe says her past experience working on Soundtrack VHS/Gold will inform her decisions on her upcoming trip to the studio.

“I’m much more focused, and I’m also giving this recording a deadline,” she says. “I’m going to try and finish up five songs in about a week and a half, which will mean lots of late nights and hard focus. This project will also be with my band mates–all five of the songs will have the same five people on them, which is a first for me. But I’m very excited about the challenge of finishing something on a fixed time limit.”

Until then, The Grime and the Glow should sate those with appetites for dark music, as long as they don’t mind the worms.

The Grime and the Glow is available for preorder through the Pendu Sound Web site. Go to pendusound.com/releases/psr-0040/. Those who pre-order the album will receive four free bonus songs for download.