by Will Floyd (@Wilf_Lloyd)
When Kyle Knapp takes the stage as the singing half of Canadian art rock duo, Deliluh, he wears a penetrating gaze into the middle distance that seems implausibly void of emotion. Think less Maynard James Keen and more a cosmically bored digital marketer, whose soul is threatening to leave their body in the middle of a 2-hour company town hall. This may just be the most relatable thing about Deliluh, whose lyrics tend to probe into the minds of outcasts everywhere, and throughout history—the expressionless gaze, an admission of solidarity with the alienation these characters experience: he, or we, could be any one of them.
If lyrics feature more prominently on Fault Lines, it may be because the band was split in half prior to its creation. Former members Erika Wharton-Shukster and Erik Jude decided to remain in Toronto when Kyle Knapp and Julius Pederson made a move to Europe, rendering them a duo for the first time. Prior to relocating, Deliluh made the kind of brooding post-rock that will go down very smoothly for any fans of the genre (that Knapp sounds so much like Brian McMahan is something you will simply have to get over), with all the requisite guitar noise and deadpan spoken word lyrics it entails. The lineup change gives Deliluh the opportunity to diversify their pallet, embracing aspects of drone, industrial rock, and ambient, where Knapp’s poetry is able to shine more prominently. The result is the group’s most varied, ambitious, and impressive work to date.
Keyboardist Julius Pederson’s drone and synth contributions throughout Fault Lines are the primary elevating agent. “Amulet” is one of the most unlikely bangers of the year and probably Deliluh’s best song, thanks to its incessant groove; “Credence (Ash in the Winds of Reason)” has a piano arpeggio that is laugh-inducingly good. The bookend tracks, “Memorial” and “Mirror of Hope'' instill an appropriate metaphysical element into an album that is inordinately concerned with the nature of spiritual experience, and possible planes of existence. Amid the warm and expansive drone and brass swells of “Memorial,” Knapp conjures the image of body and soul being disintegrated, “Surrender my heart to fire / And settle my mind to ease / Open the latch to vastness / And carry me on the breeze”. The album closer features another poem where the narrator finds herself entering an epiphanic state where she is able to contact her “mirrored spirit” on a speeding train. “No cluster of light can spoil the vast tranquility of her shadowed paradise.” It’s not the only instance on the album where transcendence of the body is denoted by the most ethereal and formless soundscapes.
Patience and restraint is the name of the game on Fault Lines, and also what set Deliluh apart from their more mainstream contemporaries: when other band’s of their ilk are content to go through the motions of a slow build, the cacophonous crescendo can feel like a foregone conclusion. Knapp and Pederson sidestep this pitfall expertly, building tracks that are far more than just a means to a climax. “X-Neighborhood” is the best example of this, as the creeping one note refrain converses back and forth with Knapp’s subtle muted guitar accompaniment, leading to a beautiful, triumphant horn outro. The whole song is a minimalist masterclass.
The most obvious point of comparison for Knapp’s lyricism is Nick Cave, for whom religion and evil are primary thematic concerns. The superficial similarities are just that, as Knapp is interested in a different sort of villain, the most haunting of which is rendered in “Amulet”. The specifics of the life are tough to nail down, but their sentiments are sickly: “Slip off your favorite affects / Or pick out a funeral dress / Take your appeal to the press / And remember my face when they ask you to dance / And I’ll rain wide spread fear in the rest / Pissing their guilt from the nest / Waiting on hard times, I’m not”. It sounds like something ripped straight from an incel forum.
“Syndicate II” is another nightmarish story where the narrator discovers “through the crack of a manhole cover” some forgotten group of rejects who “never got the chance to reach their comeuppance”. Weaved throughout all these stories are characters with an unnerving sense of how society has let them down, and what they’re owed in the wake of that betrayal. The song also features the album’s most animated vocal performances at the bridge, which would serve the group well to revisit in later works.
Among the record’s numerous positive attributes, the title is also a perfect one: an umbrella under which every song fits. What they all amount to is a study in every sort of fault line imaginable: between body and soul, consciousness and experience, good and evil, the outcast and society, and hopefully, in the group’s new era, the underground and the mainstream.