Album Review: Deer Creek, The Hiraeth Pit
Heavy existentialism. With the Welsh concept of ‘hiraeth’ — being homesick for a place to which you can never return; mourning a loss of self-in-place — at its core, The Hiraeth Pit is the second Deer Creek full-length. The long-running Denver heavy rockers issued Menticide (review here) as a 20-years-later debut album in 2022, and the seven-track/38-minute The Hiraeth Pit follows just two years after with another round of consuming riff-led miseries. That relatively quick turnaround isn’t really a factor in terms of the band’s sound, as the four-piece of guitarist/vocalists Paul Vismara and Conan Hultgren, bassist/keyboardist Stephanie Hopper and drummer Marc Brooks have been around long enough to have some sense of who they are as a group either way, but atmospherically and in terms of mood, The Hiraeth Pit — recorded and mixed by Bart McCrorey at Crash Pad Studios, mastered by Chris Gresham at Ember Audio Productions — is vividly downtrodden.
It’s not that they’re playing death-doom, or even doom at all all of the time, but life becomes a wait for death within the album’s span, and lyrics like, “Why are we here again and again?/Simply fighting for your boring life,” from the penultimate “We Dreamed of Flames and Suffocation,” or the line “I watched the last bird die in your arms,” from the more broadly socially conscious “Crushed by the Hand Slowly Filling with Gold,” are emblematic of the point of view from which the proceedings as a whole emanate. With Vismara‘s lead vocals severe in delivery in a way that in other contexts might lean toward goth but is born of classic doom, the affecting depressiveness is there from the lumbering opener “Bodies to Be Kicked” onward, and it is the defining spirit of The Hiraeth Pit. As the listener, they put you right in it, and the deeper you go, the less any kind of escape feels possible. How do you escape when you’re your own problem anyway? When the mundane becomes a thing you dread?
“Grey” takes that hopelessness and departs from its first two verses into a litany of references to science fiction from Ghost in the Shell to The Wrath of Khan, but the central question around that escapism is asking the aliens, “As you get ready to leave/Will you give us a ride?” and the answer is a resounding no. We’re stuck here, in modernity. Stuck with the opiate crisis in “Bodies to Be Kicked” or the descent into distinctly-American stupid-leads-the-way fascism on “The Wretches Who Grovel” and “Crushed by the Hand Slowly Filling with Gold,’ grifted, without agency, and punished for existing as something other than rich. Stuck as “They Were Buried Yesterday” seems like it’s trying to shake itself out of grief but can’t, and stuck as “We Dreamed of Flames and Suffocation” imagines an overthrow of what capitalists sell as the natural order, but feels all the more like a dream as Deer Creek land in the bleak reality of closer “Almshouse Stench,” where “My zest for life grows cold,” and the album’s last lines beg for relief: “Save me from this pain/For I cannot face another day/Dreadful day of rain/Plagued by this clouded fate.”
To be sure, Deer Creek aren’t the first band to operate in this kind of emotional sphere of inward-looking and outwardly-trajected disaffection, but they are striking in the forwardness with which they do it, and the according feeling of gruel with which The Hiraeth Pit is delivered. It is resolute in its sadness, weary by the finish in a way that is consuming but not necessarily mirrored in the tempos of “Bodies to Be Kicked” or “The Wretches Who Grovel,” which at least feel relatively upbeat for how disheartened much of the lyrical perspective actually is. This contrast becomes part of what makes The Hiraeth Pit so engrossing, and it’s worth emphasizing the word “relatively” in that last sentence; it’s not like Deer Creek are writing Torche-style sludge-pop about feeling dead inside, but there’s movement in that opening duo and in the cave-doom-NWOBHM (think Witchfinder General and Pagan Altar, etc.) chug in the chorus of “Crushed by the Hand Slowly Filling with Gold” that lets the material come across as not completely void of hope even as “Crushed by the Hand Slowly Filling with Gold” resolves in flashes of noisy “soloing” that feel specifically in the tradition of Saint Vitus, who of course were no slouches themselves when it came to thematic downerism.
Ultimately, the lesson of The Hiraeth Pit isn’t so far removed from that of Menticide, but the sophomore long-player feels more purposeful in its construction as it makes a centerpiece of “They Were Buried Yesterday” and gives breadth to the central intangibility of mourning: “Ah, I miss you.” Not brutal in the sense of death metal or other extreme styles, it nonetheless seems to center around the weight of its emotionalism as much as that offered tonally, and that leaves even “Grey” — which is arguably the least melancholic of the tracks, with its self-aware winks at The Empire Strikes Back, Dune, and so on — as an act of labor. But at no point, in “Grey” or otherwise, does it feel performative, like the band are putting on some woebegone veneer. In this way, “We Dreamed of Flames and Suffocation” feels almost daring in its willingness to envision living something other than the boot-on-neck life, and the most punishing impact isn’t even the extra-fervent plod around which “Almhouse Stench” coils and the low, throaty growl that accompanies, but the overarching feeling of loss and being lost that finds its culmination therein.
I’ve remarked on the lyrics a decent amount, and fair enough as The Hiraeth Pit has something to say about what serves as its crux in terms of subject matter, but it’s noteworthy that the title-line itself, which appears in “They Were Buried Yesterday,” isn’t trying to revel or celebrate grief. There’s no glee. But as purposeful as Deer Creek are in the expression that defines the work, they’re not lost in it or themselves consumed by what, as a listener, feels so consuming. This is where 20 years of songwriting before they did their first record comes into play, perhaps, but it’s also clear that in following-up Menticide, they’ve discovered something more about what makes an album a front-to-back experience. The Hiraeth Pit only benefits from this learning.
