My Relatives Die At A Rate Of One Per Year
…or, A Five Star Review Of An Album I Didn’t Like.
It’s been five years since we’d last gotten Bell Witch. It’s not like they disappeared; on the contrary, in 2020 they teamed up with Aerial Ruin for a full-length of funeral folk. But Bell Witch proper, the bass-drums duo responsible for vivifying funeral doom with 2017’s Mirror Reaper, didn’t even announce they were working on new music until three days before releasing their latest LP. How do you follow up eighty-three minutes and fifteen seconds’ worth of genre-redefinitional songwriting?
With a better eighty-three minute and fifteen second song, naturally. Yes, The Clandestine Gate, entry number one in the Future’s Shadow triptych, is better than Mirror Reaper. Deemphasizing the importance of riffs, Bell Witch open the way to music for emotion’s sake. The first growl arrives after near forty minutes of melodic movements just on the lofty side of staid — by the band’s own description, the vastness of a single death, the way a universe that surpasses us is nevertheless contained in individual consciousness.
The Clandestine Gate is better than Mirror Reaper, and it speaks nothing to me.
I enter Bell Witch’s timeline halfway between their second-to and latest LP, in the summer of 2019. I’m laying in bed, smoking an amount that would qualify me for rehab if we culturally considered marijuana addictive, looking for something like Dopethrone, a recommendation from a friend’s friend. Electric Wizard got it, but I was unfillable. I needed more it, whatever it was. A few months would pass before I learned it was heaviness. (You can fight me on what the ‘heavy’ in ‘metal’ means, but I’ll win.) All I knew then was that Mirror Reaper was drummer Adrian Guerra’s elegy to himself: having passed before recording, his cut vocals from a previous album haunted the climactic “Words of the Dead” movement.
This touched in me a grief I should not have had. The last time someone I knew died, I was twelve years old, and it mostly meant an excuse to rent Halo ODST while my mother comforted distant aunts. Still, I blew out my car speakers blasting Mirror Reaper at neighborhood-bothering volumes. The amount of time I spent with headphones on gave me the beginnings of hearing loss. Once, my father walked into one of my ritual listening sessions, and stared in the doorway at the bodily contortions the intensity of the music made me express. God bless him, he is dead now.
At the peak of this obsession, I began transitioning. And, with the sui generis intensity of what would predictably turn out to be psychotic mania, I conceptualized transition as suicide. It was a slow killing that didn’t always have to do with becoming a girl: even in men’s medium, a Bell Witch longsleeve was the first piece of clothing I’d ever been happy to call mine. Here started dying Julias by other names, like the one that knew how to speak to her maternal grandparents.
I did not want family-Julia to die. I wanted to know my grandparents the way I’d always known them, but they’re both seventy-something homophobes. Attempts to reach out to my grandmother were met with snide, would-be covert attempts at regressing me, while my grandfather demonstrated an ostrich-like skill for denial. In retaliation for trying, that Julia was killed. That’s the tragedy that makes a good horror movie. Someone has plenty to get better for is killed.
I thought a lot about dying. I got really, really into death metal, horror cinema in rock form. I didn’t just metaphorize suicide, I hallucinated it. My body hanged by the neck from a rafter not present in my real room. Car on fire, me at the wheel, seatbelt still on. Only through Bell Witch’s tectonically paced repetition could I match the aftershocks of psychosis. All this time, I had been grieving myself. And it wasn’t just the death of the Julia I’d wanted to kill, but ones I didn’t know were alive: a Julia that liked her studies, a Julia with an enduring friend group, a Julia with a job. I wrote a lot, then. Awareness of the multiplicity of Julias, even in their passing, came with a pantheon of characters to make and remake. Within, they all were real.
Then my grandmother died of cancer.
Now death was outside me. Death was cancer recurrence, less time left than I’d like, COVID and a video call goodbye. Death was that she never apologized. It was stupid and it did not fit in eighty minutes of doom metal. Trying to branch out, I stumbled on Mount Erie’s A Crow Looked At Me. Of his wife’s death, the singer says: “It’s not for singing about, it’s not for making into art.” That’s right. I switched the music off.
I would have liked to catch a break then. Four months later, my father had brain cancer. Cold hope, radiation machines and the Tijuana autumn; warm death, shit, adult diapers. You know how this one ends. It was the 27th of December, a year and three days since my grandmother had died, and none of it’d had fuck all to do with jamming out.
I tried to jam anyway. Writing wasn’t working. In fact, I haven’t finished a piece of fiction since December of 2021. Hooray for backup plans: I’ve wanted to be a musician for a while. I have a good growl and I synthesize guitars for composing. I put together an elegy for my father. First to go were my attempts at mimicking the choke-snorting sound of his death throes. Then I decided not to release the thing altogether.
I’ve become insensate. When all of me gazed inward, I made art easily. I wrote characters, and I wrote stories, and I wrote them until the end. I try not to look rosily at the past. I was amateur, self-absorbed to boot. But oh my God: I wrote characters, and the characters had stories, and the stories happened until the end.
Now my imagination is damaged. My ability to fantasize has been overgrown by the callus I developed as to not follow my relatives into the six feet deep. I’m not afraid of lifting the stone, just preconceived. I know Julia has suffocated down there.
Ten minutes after listening to The Clandestine Gate, I got the news my paternal grandmother was dying. Today she has been dead for twenty-four hours.
I’ve hit the limit for grief. The calmed turbulence of accepting that my maternal grandmother would never get to be anything more than paggro at best; the gradual revelation that my father had been unkind in ways I never dreamt, and kind to others in ways he’d never be to me; the preponderant inevitability of my paternal grandmother’s age, who was already seventy-one when I was born. I average one death per year. I expect the rest to be plain remixes of the emotions that have beaten my cranium, first to a pulp, then, after regeneration, to a misshapen ovoid, easily bent now that it doesn’t have to accomodate a brain.
Even writing this, I’m more hurt by the loss of my ability to write than I am for my grandmother. God bless her, she is dead now, she is just dead. I went to funeral mass, like I did for my father. In-person church was still forbidden on the Christmas my maternal grandmother died of COVID. I wrote entire books on suicide, not knowing the psychotic-Julia responsible for them was already dying. She wanted to dedicate a book to death metal. God bless her too.
The Pitchfork review that showed me Mirror Reaper dares grasp at optimism in an album that closes with the word “writhe”. Bell Witch posit Future’s Shadow around eternal return, the philosophical concept of time as a closed causal loop, everything dead some day coming back. There’s a desire, looking at the raw and ugly, to dig for hope. Maybe it’s natural to want to counterbalance tragedy with growth. Well, here is what I have learned: life is the prelude to death, and death is boring. What is then isn’t. I envy the ability to turn this nonsense into art. Me, I want to be airdropped in the desert, and forget that I have lives left to die.
Abuela:
Your God was the God of Nazareth, and I won’t take that from you,
but if there is another life, I hope to know you better in it.
