Album Review: Serial Hawk, Psychic Pain
Psychic Pain is the third album and a welcome return from Seattle trio Serial Hawk — guitarist/vocalist Will Bassin, bassist Adam Holbrook and, making his first appearance, drummer Karter Rosner — who with its five songs renew their commitment to lumber and crush. Not immediately, granted. The three-minute drone intro “Pulsate” indeed seems to find some tension in the peaks and troughs of a drone waveform, echoing into space with a foreboding ambience that’s justified as soon as “Raw Wound” (7:30) slams in, Rosner hitting hard as the tones of Holbrook and Bassin unveil their full tonal heft. They dig into an intro in “Raw Wound” as well, letting the crash and plod play out in declarative fashion — this is a thing we can do — before kicking the tempo just before a minute and a half in and galloping into a growled verse.
The crash’n’bash ethic meets its inevitable end in a slowdown that gets to grueling levels of plod topped with bellowing howls, but they’re still not halfway through the first song yet. “Raw Wound” is heavy at its quietest, but after its midpoint, it begins a forward procession that feels like a march, but if it is, is one following its own pattern. More tortured verses cut through the voluminous mix by the returning Robert Cheek at ExEx Audio, who also engineered, and “Raw Wound” opens up to an airy guitar solo before giving back to its stomping central riff, but slower, to finish.
A synthy, flatter-somehow drone starts centerpiece “Drift Away” (8:13), soon joined by echoing guitar and cymbal wash, a dreamy minute setting up a subdued and melodic, Floydian verse. The drums enter subtly to begin the change, and at 2:31, “Drift Away” finds its footing in a massive lurch, revealing itself soon enough to be a heavygaze-style nod with a melodic vocal reach that reminds of Patrick Walker — a decidedly more emotive take and a shift in approach overall from the somewhat colder concrete slab’s comfort offered on “Raw Wound,” but then, that’s kind of the movement of pain too. First it hurts and then you’re sad it hurts. “Drift Away” isn’t hopeless in mood, necessarily, but six years after the band’s second album, 2019’s Static Apnea (review here), it conveys a grief that should be well familiar to anybody who’s lost someone in the last six years. Which is just about everybody.
“Drift Away” moves from its My Bloody Valentine-style chug into an even heavier roll in its second half, as though the band were trying to flatten their own feelings with the riffs — therapy for all — but its 90-plus seconds are spent in a quiet contemplation of guitar after the last rumble has faded. It’s a synthier, lower backing drone that makes the outro — which is nonetheless a bookend for the start of the track — sound almost like the quiet part before Meshuggah destroy the universe or somesuch, and it leads into the quick feedback snipe and let’s-fucking-go inherited-from-noise-rock riff sweep of “Psychic Pain” (11:34) itself. The sprawling title-track and presumed side B leadoff is a highlight unto itself, with a shouted verse amid the swaying groove they establish, a big mosh of the sort that Sweden’s Domkraft have so righteously proliferated. Daring to be fun.
For a while, anyhow. The cacophony grows quiet as Rosner turns the drums into a “Black Sabbath”-ish slog and guest vocalist Lauren Lavin — familiar contributors Mike Sparks, Jr. and the already-mentioned Cheeks also feature somewhere on the record, I know neither where nor in what capacity — adds voice to an atmospheric breadth to give the listener a focal point while the band sneakily build back up.
The roll renews circa 4:20 (obvs.) and finds its way into a willfully more angular transition before leaning hard on a riff that is more trad-doom in its construction — it also sounds like Black Sabbath, but different Sabbath, and not trying to be cheeky in saying it that way; if you want a closer, more obscure analog: the intro riff of Asteroid‘s “The Great Unknown” — and basking in its sheer largesse for the next however long it is until just before 10 minutes in there’s some sign of letup as they draw back the onslaught and space out a hypnotic ending that transitions directly into the feedback fade-in at the outset of closer “Caged” (5:53).
It’s not the first slow, feedback-soaked churn the band have proffered at this point, and that’s just fine. At its outset, “Caged” feels somewhat like an album outro — whether or not it was written to close the album, I don’t know, but it works where it is — but it isn’t only that as the shouted approach of “Raw Wound” renews, a downer riff seeming to give the whole movement a sense of drag through its initial succession of verses, but also working on a post-metallic build for its own ending before it’s even halfway done. It’s not quite the drop-everything-and-follow-this-riff conclusion Neurosis once wrought in “Stones From the Sky,” but it follows a not dissiimlar pattern of descending into noise as it heads to the finish.
Coupled with the adrenaline Serial Hawk are at that point riding, the agonized vocals of Bassin from within the mounting assault of “Caged” are a distinguishing presence. “Not only does that storm exist, but there’s someone in there,” etc. As they have all along, Serial Hawk give “Caged” its due space for an ending, and round out a varied course made cohesive through scope and performance with one last example of doing whatever they want and making it work. If that’s the underlying message of the record, so be it, and fair enough a decade on from their first album, 2015’s Searching for Light (review here), for the band to make such a fervent and multifaceted declaration of who they are.
As regards the titular theme of Psychic Pain, it doesn’t seem like “Caged” is at a point where things are hunky-dory, but it sure is cathartic, and especially after the intricacy of the title-track, the manner in which they strip down the attack to end is satisfying as an individual piece and as the tie-together moment for the record as a whole. I’ll admit to being somewhat surprised a new Serial Hawk LP exists at all, but that it does is good news for those who’ve followed them since their inception and for newcomers alike. Surely Psychic Pain will be the first experence for many of Serial Hawk‘s particular take on heavy — rougher than what you’d generally consider progressive, but not unthoughtful by any means — and as such it’s fortunate it resonates with a persona so much the band’s own.
