Love has a remarkable talent for turning perfectly functional adults into shipwrecks. One minute you’re making plans for a shared future, and the next you’re staring across the dinner table at someone who might as well be broadcasting from the far side of Neptune. The temperature drops, conversations become archaeological exercises, and whatever affection once kept the machinery running has frozen solid beneath several thousand feet of accumulated disappointment. Somewhere in the Arctic, an abandoned vessel sits trapped beneath the ice, providing Seattle’s Black Ferns with a splendid metaphor for romantic catastrophe.
Failed Plans, the latest single from Black Ferns‘ forthcoming third album, Di Lodus, takes this miserable little expedition into the frigid waters of post-punk, where guitars stretch toward the horizon and synthesizers hum with the indifferent patience of a malfunctioning Soviet submarine.
Zoran Macesic has an ear for the sort of guitar melody that once made Echo & the Bunnymen sound as though they were holding séances inside abandoned cathedrals. Those ringing, heavily treated chords move through the arrangement with considerable force, while the bass and drums maintain a steady, almost mechanical momentum. The synthesizers add an uncomfortable chill, filling the spaces between the instruments with an electronic unease that brings to mind the more psychologically troubled corners of Love and Rockets.
There’s a delicious contradiction in the arrangement: the music keeps moving forward while the lyrics contemplate permanent immobility. A ship imprisoned beneath Arctic ice becomes a lover stranded inside a relationship whose emotional resources have been exhausted. Macesic approaches the subject through abstract imagery, allowing the listener to assemble the wreckage without receiving a tedious inventory of every broken promise.
His vocals inhabit the recording with a distant, almost disembodied quality, occasionally sinking into the instrumental layers as the guitars climb overhead. Producer Lincoln Traveller gives the instruments enough room to breathe while maintaining an oppressive sense of enclosure, as though the entire performance were taking place inside the metal hull of that unfortunate vessel.
By the conclusion, the ship remains stranded, the relationship appears terminal, and nobody has thought to send a rescue party. Meanwhile, those guitars keep turning in magnificent, miserable circles, providing a fitting soundtrack for anyone who’s ever watched a promising future disappear beneath the ice.
Listen to Failed Plans below and order the single here.
Black Ferns have spent more than a decade exploring the intersection of gothic rock, post-punk, and electronic music, and Failed Plans suggests that Di Lodus, an eleven-track collection, will continue that fascination with emotional disintegration.
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