BLACKWATER HOLYLIGHT - Not Here Not Gone

"Not Here Not Gone". It's a title that suggests a ghostly presence, and it belongs to the fourth full-length by Blackwater Holylight, a work that marks the full maturation of the band's sound. If bass, drums and guitars build an impenetrable mansion of doom, stoner and heavy & psych with walls caked in pitch, the voices of Alison (also on bass) and Laura (also on guitar) are the dreamy, ectoplasmic dream-gaze matter that drifts through its labyrinthine corridors.

Call it "doomgaze" if you like, a dark musical territory that undoubtedly began years ago, probably with Jesu, but one that the five women from Oregon interpret with a personal touch, a lyrical sweetness very redolent of the Nineties, and a strong leaning toward song form.

Just listen to the opening tracks "How Will You Feel", "Involuntary Haze" and "Bodies": instrumentally three deadly traps, three deafening engines of stoner-metal repetition, but also three hits arriving decades too late in the vein of Shirley Manson and Hope Sandoval. The song structure progressively comes undone starting with the following "Heavy, Why?", the emotional epicenter of the record, where the voices keep tracing mournful melodies while the sound takes on the shape of a muddy landslide bent on swallowing everything whole. With an electronic storm bursting in and guitars emerging from the rubble like tremors, the track's ending is also one of the album's psychedelic peaks.

For the other one, you have to wait for the closing "Poppyfields". A romp through a field of tulips, certainly, but propelled by Eliese's drums at warp speed. The stems scratch our eyes and cheeks, then, and the flowers can't help but recall blood.

Blackwater Holylight are undoubtedly at their best when they push hard, when the contrast between the sheer firepower of the sound and the delicacy of the vocal parts is pushed to the extreme. So more transitional episodes, like the psychedelic interlude "Giraffe" and the melting "Fade", inevitably come across as less engaging than the rest.

Given that the band's earlier records are well worth digging into for gems like "Motorcycle", "Not Here Not Gone" delivers a band finally at the peak of its considerable powers, to the point of having penned some potential contemporary alt-classics.

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18/02/2026