Klein – thirteen sense

For her last album marked the South London maverick Klein swapped her usual grab bag of sodden gospel and keening soul plus all of those other furtive and windswept, street-wired late night atmospherics for a searingly up-front barrage of guitar feedback. In swift succession thirteen sense ploughs the same sort of furrow, on the one hand less visceral and more spectral as it eschews some of the heavy metal riffs and sloganeering of marked for a more fulsome embrace of shoegaze and even slowcore plus other post-rock textures albeit still pushed firmly into the red, while on the other hand thirteen sense is even more of a departure for Klein as it more thoroughly foregoes the grimey beats and syncopated dance-adjacent rhythms which previously undergirded her music.

The album opener ‘great guilt’ abounds in pummelling drums and swirling, all-encompassing waves of feedback as a few splintering piano keys waft through the murk. At once a bombastic introduction to the record and a token of what’s in store, ‘great guilt’ even approaches the bravado of arena rock while featuring the album’s only sustained vocal as Klein sees ‘blood on the flag, smoke in the mirror’ and amid other strained entreaties prays for a blessing ‘but the odds won’t stack’. While last summer’s marked offered ‘breaking news’ as an endlessly scrolling chyron shorn of content here Klein subverts a civil rights slogan by stressing ‘no pain, no justice’ but there is no framing or reframing of the context and no search for meaning as the artist doubles down on the guitar and begins to drift off into the aether.

‘double life’ blurs the grinding lurch of garage rock with emergent shoegaze melodies in the manner of classic My Bloody Valentine, as those walls of guitar overlay a looser and loping backbeat. The battering drums of ‘crush’ give way to something more ornamental, in the manner of new age music or the Japanese environmental genre of kankyō ongaku. And another quickie in ‘who you are’ opens out onto a science fiction terrain replete with alien antenna.

‘role of fear’ continues to slough off the atmospheric drag as roiling staticky distortions cede to grinding guitars. The shifting textures and moving parts of some of the longer tracks like ‘double life’ and ‘role of fear’ produce a pulsating, trance-like effect which is unusually engrossing and makes thirteen seconds stand out as among the best in its class. ‘role of fear’ for instance sublimates siren horns which lend the piece a vaguely classical spirit, like with Lou Reed’s enfant terrible Metal Machine Music on which the artist claimed to have encoded classical symphonies such as Beethoven’s celebrated early romance Eroica. ‘nobody sees what the tree knows’ also changes form during the course of the composition, as a late smog and some fairground organ consume the drilling percussion and piercingly high pitches.

‘goodnight mommy, goodnight daddy’ starts out more grungy before becoming shrouded and spectral through a process of subtraction as thirteen seconds commences its weightless third arc. Now less scabrous and taking more of a cosmic bent, ‘eternal’ seems to manifest through parting clouds the hoisting up of the Milky Way with its endless and indivisible stars, at least until Klein adds a gauzy covering to the night as some more smeared organ facilitates the drama. The starless and furtive ‘(hoodwink)’ segues into the driving ‘hard 2 kill VOL 2’ while ‘blood on the flag’ is a sloshed and shimmering closer, as Klein flickers and twinkles distended in space like something out of Neon Genesis Evangelion or a Paul Klee angel.