KATHRYN MOHR - Waiting Room

It lies in that world on the border between dream and nightmare, the new album by Kathryn Mohr. A space where the antithesis between man and nature is even more jarring, an almost cinematic scenario perpetually poised between ancestral folk sounds and drone-music as ambiguous as the future.

Long fascinated by the antithesis between nature and humanity, Kathryn Mohr chose an abandoned fish factory in an Icelandic village to record her new album alone, staying true to the idea of tying the artistic project to a place and to those objects that speak of humanity's presence, at times intrusive. The acoustic guitar chords are skeletal and bloodless, closer to an ambient-horror soundtrack than a ritual celebration of nature. It's no surprise, then, that the stories Mohr tells focus on the fleetingness of life, the fallibility of memory, and harrowing tales of injustice and mental health.

It's the natural and necessary ferocity of nature that forms the first element of "Waiting Room". The all-too-bare notes of "Diver" resemble the crackle of withered leaves or the muffled fury of a swollen river, sonic and melodic distortions that sound even darker and more sinister on "Petrified". The sonic disintegration is as palpable and disturbing as the stench of an animal dead for days; some might dare call it blues, but this isn't the cry of suffering humanity, rather the even more frightening cry of the nature it has trampled.

Torment and ecstasy form a single expressive whole for Kathryn Mohr, yet "Waiting Room" is not a mournful, musically monochromatic album: alt-rock urges surface often ("Wheel"), along with noise dissonances ("Elevator") and folk-rock ballads as melodically urgent and poignant as a demo by a grunge band ("Take It").

It's a slow-burning album, this new work from the American artist, recalling that exercise in rock deconstruction that Hugo Largo once skillfully turned into art – just listen to the gorgeous, nocturnal “Horizonless” – or those sonic abysses that corrupted the dark soul of new wave in the 1980s (the cryptic, original field recording-based digression of “Cornered”).

Intimate, profound, subtly dissolute and deceptive, “Waiting Room” takes the listener by the hand – or rather, by the ears – promising yet another journey into goth-folk. The path is thorny and treacherous, but even when peace seems to take hold (the title track), madness and beauty travel in sync: solitude and contemplation become the only escape from horror and decay, yet it is from doubt that new certainties are born.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

01/03/2025