Gazelle Twin reappears with a ghost story at Hallowe’en. Black Dog is a mysterious, unsettling, album that uses a cheap horror mask to explore childhood anxieties. Wrapped in a lurid cover with an illustration of a house caught in the salivating jaws of a wild-eyed devil dog, strongly reminiscent of budget VHS rentals and pulp horror novels it’s less monster movie than psychological horror. The sound is cold and uncluttered, synth drones and ghostly bumps pierced by Elizabeth Bernholz’s voice. Fitting its theme of haunting, it is somehow both heavy and insubstantial, the air damp with dread.
Folk horror, the occult weirdness of childhood and the stylistic quirks of 70s/80s horror movies are themes that have all been widely explored by underground and experimental musicians in recent years. Much of that stuff works by exploiting certain genre clichés, pushing them into the foreground for a particular thrills ‘n’ chills experience. Brushing past with the lightest of touches Gazelle Twin uses familiar elements sparingly and maintains a singular voice. Having turned out a steady stream of soundtrack work these past few years she is no doubt keenly attuned to avoiding anything that might seem tired or over exposed.
The title track arrives early and frames the album. Night time, a half waking half dreaming shadow world. A storybook telling of a ghost story over a sickly electronic pulse. It writhes and glitches, eventually flaring like a threat “It took my heart, ripped it clean out” before subsiding. Possibly you thought Elizabeth Bernholz’s happy childhood was knocked off course by the combined misery of puberty and school as visited in her breakthrough Unflesh album. Maybe you already had a sense she was a weird kid. Black Dog refers to encounters with a dark presence in her childhood home.
Typically for Bernholz there’s much more going on here than the idea she might have seen a ghost in her parent’s bedroom. Black Dog is a confrontation with the primal experience of fear. On claustrophobic, icy creeper ‘Fear Keeps Us Alive’ it’s the way male violence haunts public spaces, particularly at night, a suffocating sense of an awful potential. ‘Two Worlds’ seems to come from the perspective of an unquiet spirit trapped in place, longing for release. Although less supernatural readings are possible.
Largely the tracks are sparse and uneasy, fragmented structures moving to internal rhythms rather than steady beats. ‘Unstoppable Force’ however strikes up a marching rhythm and takes a combative stance, taunting “push me, push me, go on”. At its centre it dissolves into an ectoplasmic pool of swirling synth and a softer, distant, voice intoning “I believe in life after death, I believe in the shadow of the soul”, before the chopping rhythms return accelerating towards a sudden end.
Particularly in its second half, Black Dog explores haunting as a projection of psychic trauma. It would appear parenthood has not mellowed Elizabeth Bernholz but then it’s something of a myth that it’s a cosy if exhausting experience. Parenthood brings a new level of terror to the everyday. Beyond the responsibility for a fragile young life, it wastes little time unravelling the tapestry of your self delusion. You think you’re grown now and have worked some stuff out, are more rational and self controlled. You are mistaken. It is like a haunting to see your own childhood return with a startling emotional intensity and feel no better equipped to navigate it.
The final track, ‘A Door Opens’ lets in the light after the album’s dark, dark night. There is calm, a sense of reconciliation as she confesses “I have been a burden” over a steady bed of piano samples. Warm and soft where the rest of the album is dark and chilling it is no more resolved. As concise as Bernholz’s compositions are they retain an eerie multiplicity making for an album as affecting and hard to describe as the apparition at its core.
