Bleep

Stretching her three-octave range to breaking point and recasting it over avant compositions which mine a grey area between piercing folk and glitched electronics, Eartheater’s fourth album is an exorcism worthy of its cover art: striking, fiery, impossible to ignore.

A one-time member of psych outfit Guardian Alien, Alexandra Drewchin’s music as Eartheater has always carried a psychoactive coating. As far back as her work on the excellent experimental label Hausu Mountain, you could hear an artist wilfully attempting to poke holes in reality. 2015’s “RIP Chrysalis” was particularly haunted, a mode that Drewchin moved away from with more beat-driven albums and mixtapes for PAN, but one that continues to thrill.

“Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin” has a few barked rap refrains and the occasional bass pulse, but broadly strips back anything permutable to a club. Instead, the fourth as Eartheater carries more traces of unfamiliar terrain than any other to date. Sketched out while Drewchin was undergoing an artist residency in Zaragoza, she was in touching distance to the dust and heat of a yellow-and-red desert. Fittingly, the album bottles a kind of scorched, dry air. And if the sound wasn’t clear enough, the LP’s artwork –– easily 2020’s most eye-popping cover and, as time goes on, one surely destined for cult status on shelves –– makes a sizable downpayment on the concept of fire and flesh.

“Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin” is the result of being personally burned. A major relationship wound to its conclusion. Drewchin has never seemed more consumed by, and open to working through, base impulses and heartbreak. On the raw closer ‘How To Fight’, she tells us “I’ve tasted metals of my own blood and learned to like it. I’ve gone under the knife of love; dissected every vein and vessel.” Elsewhere, she compares physical release to tectonic plates and pits of lava. With each synth lead that glows like embers, or an elegiac sweep of harp and strings, she brings us –– and herself –– closer to some kind of solace.

There’s a lethal edge to the music that requires the right mindset to engage with it. Drewchin has never shied away from making good on her range, letting her voice twist upward and plunge downward across whatever instrumentation there is to hand. But on “Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin”, we are treated to the Queens artist in an intimate state. This isn’t your uncle’s folk music, but the washes of gentle guitars and soft balladeering make it a modern slant on folk nonetheless. “Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin” is witheringly honest and emotionally tender enough to send chills down the spine, striking it out as a rare breed in 2020.