Count all your blessings
Write out a curse
for all you have taken
I’ll make your life worse
Faith is a peculiar bargain when the people asking for it have already broken their promises. We are encouraged to count our blessings, accept inherited wisdom, and trust that those giving the orders know where they are taking us. Yet reassurance begins to sound rather sinister when it requires us to overlook what is plainly wrong. Once that trust gives way, doubt becomes difficult to contain. The search for meaning continues, complicated by the suspicion that those offering salvation have helped create the need for it.
That uneasy passage from belief to suspicion runs through heaveness, the new single from Thames Valley’s violet oscillation. Released October 30, it follows this year’s debut EP, it has become clear to me that all those who seek. The band’s frontman, Luca, has also become a familiar presence within shoegaze through Pedal Partners, his channel devoted to the effects and experiments that help turn six strings into something considerably less earthbound.
The song opens with small ripples of guitar and soft distortion, the reverbed strumming feeling almost like cool air against bare skin. Luca’s voice murmurs from the other side of the veil as the chords lengthen and the distortion gathers weight. My Bloody Valentine provides a reference for that friction between sweetness and abrasion, while Slowdive comes to mind in the suspended vocals and the sense of distance opening between each layer. The gradual swells suggest the patient, accumulating force of Explosions in the Sky, with post-rock scale meeting shoegaze’s intimate handling of the voice. Luca’s British inflections remain audible through the effects, a small human detail within all that amplification.
The lyrics read like an argument with people who claim the right to lead. Blessings turn to curses; sinners and preachers share the same uneasy company; promises of renewal run up against an older generation’s corruption. Luca moves between accusation, fear, and the suspicion that every available answer has already been compromised. There is a particular exhaustion in being told to read between lines that have themselves become suspect. By the closing admission, “i just think about it all the time,” the wider disillusionment has become a private, repetitive burden.
Luca says of the single: “This is my most poignant release to date, ‘heaveness’ is a visceral experience. Musically, lyrically & visually this is the most I’ve ever had to say.”
The accompanying video places Abstract in Sound’s twins within a landscape that seems unable to settle into a single version of itself. They walk along woodland paths and stand among the trees, their long hair and dark clothing giving the scenes a quietly gothic character. Violet and rose colour washes pass over the foliage; monochrome passages give way to bleached negative exposures, while overlapping images loosen the outlines of faces and branches.
Close-ups of a thorned stem interrupt the softer views of water and leaves, adding a sharp visual detail to the film’s diffuse light. The repeated images of the twins make recognition itself feel uncertain, as though the camera keeps returning to a memory it cannot quite recover. Its blurred surfaces suit the guitars, but there is also a useful connection to the words: amid so much visual transformation, even an ordinary path through the trees becomes difficult to trust.
Watch the video for heaveness below.
Listen to heaveness below and order the single here. You can also find streaming links here.
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