Photo credit: Kyle LaMere
Marielle Allschwang’s records conjure a sense of almost uncanny unease, a chill that comes from hearing a voice as prim and saintly as Allschwang’s sing songs this cold and menacing. The effect is akin to sitting around a campfire with Julie Andrews then watching as she puts a flashlight under her face and sings a frightening tale. It's almost hard to reconcile the mixed emotions it invites.
To the extent there’s a precedent for Allschwang, and there really isn’t much of one, it’s probably Tara Jane O’Neil, the great, underrated singer-songwriter who cut her teeth in the Louisville, Kentucky music scene and bands like Rodan and The Sonora Pine. O’Neil was enough of a talent that she probably would have made notable music wherever she landed, but she happened to land in a very specific scene at a very specific time—the Louisville post-rock scene of the mid-’90s—and it left an indelible stamp on her work. The songs were hers alone, but the music was built on the foundation of an entire community’s shared playbook.
And so it is with Allschwang and Milwaukee’s similarly distinctive post-rock scene, with its shared tics and textures. In a press release for her new album VISITATIONS IV, Allschwang claims inspiration from Led Zeppelin, Fugazi, George Gurdjieff, Kate Bush and Alvin Lucier, and if I squint I can hear echoes of all those touchstones (well, maybe not all of them; I had to Wikipedia George Gurdjieff). But the driving influence is always Milwaukee itself, as reflected through the inventive backing band Allschwang has assembled: drummer Kavi Laud, guitarist Ken Palme, bassist/guitarist Nathaniel Heuer and guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Adam Krause. Collectively they play off of the last 20+ years of Milwaukee post-rock, and they make it thunder and glisten.
Even more than Allschwang’s 2015 album Dead Not Done, VISITATIONS IV thrives on volume, and it’s a thrill to make the latent math-rock influences that have always underlined her work explicitly announce themselves on songs like “Ototha” and “Matterfreedom” (some especially doomy musical saw seals the deal on that second one). And yet, fierce as it often is, VISITATIONS IV is not difficult music. You don’t have to think to enjoy it, or have to be versed in the history of Crouton Records to appreciate the history that Allschwang and her band are building on. A song as viscerally gorgeous as “312: Year Of The Optical Fire” doesn’t ask anything of you other than your ear. For all its braininess, this is music you feel in your gut.
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VISITATIONS IV is out now. You can stream it below, via Bandcamp, and catch Allschwang and her band play a release show tonight, Wednesday, May 8, at Cactus Club at 8 p.m. with Nadah El Shazly and Names Divine, along with DJ sets from Apollo Vermouth.
