buffaBLOG - The Buffalo music blog: Album of the Week: Cemeteries

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Album of the Week: Cemeteries - The Wilderness

The first track I ever heard from Cemeteries, the solo project of Buffalo native Kyle J. Reigle, was a cover of Neon Indian’s track “I Should Have Taken Acid With You”, which was released second in a three-part series of ‘Virtual’ 7-inches in December 2010. I played it on repeat for close to a week. It wasn’t just the way that Reigle transformed the track from a quintessential chillwave staple to an ethereal, elegant dream-pop drone, but his ability at making the essence of the track horrifyingly ironic. With sprawled out, waxing guitar-work combined with hushed, reverbed vocals Reigle takes a track generically precursory to bedroom goth-pop, and gets uber creepy, bastardizing the original title in psychedelic slow-dance fashion. Two years later, Reigle has only intensified his goth-pop sound on the superb 9-track sophomore record The Wilderness.

Building on what contemporaries Youth Lagoon and Porcelain Raft are already doing so well, which is holing oneself up in four walls and mentally transcending the notion of place, Cemeteries deviates from typical bedroom-pop acts stylistically as he seeks to abandon the more accessible gloominess of the urban back-alley or crumbling suburban parking lot, and retreats instead to the darkness which lurks in the uncertainty of rust-beltic woods just outside the smoggy glow of the city.

In an interview from last year, Reigle said he began his first album, Speaking Horrors as most bedroom artists do: as a hobby put out via his Bandcamp page. It quickly became the most popular download in our region, and with a little persistence, Cemeteries was eventually signed by Lefse, who supports prevalent artists such as Teen Daze, a musician Cemeteries just played a CMJ showcase with this past week in NYC.

Inspired by hours spent in front of the TV watching countless horror flicks from childhood on, The Wilderness doesn't so much seek to indulge in the utterly terrifying niche of the film genre, but rather the more mysterious and unsettling aspects. Think Twin Peaks rather than Nightmare on Elm Street. Sonic highlights “Young Blood” and “Summer Smoke” exhibit a hybrid of Atlas Sound and The Antlers. Reigle's take on songwriting is not-traditional, and instead relies on a linear scaffold of instrumental ascension and repetition. He starts with one or two tracks and slowly builds a landscape of cascading drums and washes of reverb-heavy guitar riffs that give off a blissfully unsettling aura that compares to hair-raising and at times uplifting tactics that Phil Elverum and the late Mark Linkous have evoked through their respective bodies of work.

Yes, we’ve heard musicians that sound like Cemeteries before. There’s the headstrong reliance on reverb, synth swells, waves of guitar that hang in twangy echo, but there’s a genius behind tracks like “In the Trees” that sets The Wilderness apart from records that simply want to sound woozy. There’s an embodiment of nostalgia that goes beyond indie trend; Reigle wants you to feel unique headaches of uneasiness, similar to the euphoria of deja vu or a hailstorm in the summer. Cemeteries wants you to walk into the woods at dusk and think the owls are not what they seem. Reigle isn't writing songs about the wilderness to be clever, but rather writing about the essence of whatever it is that we experience alone in the woods to realize what makes home or a particular place so safe and familiar.

As if I need to expand any further on the David Lynch parallels on The Wilderness, the gem "Leland" is named after the grieving father of Laura Palmer on Twin Peaks (FYI the entire series is available to stream on Netflix), and tumbles out of your speakers effortlessly like the visual motifs of a surging waterfall and wind-whipped pines found in the cult TV series. Even more evidence of the show's influence seems to peak through in an excerpt from the artist's Soundcloud page which reads, “Cemeteries is the dream pop transmitting over the truck radio of teenagers driving the dark labyrinth of outlying woods in a mountain town.”

Cemeteries' vocals are a separate enigma altogether. Shrouded in haze and manneristic underpinnings of label-mates The Morning Clouds, “What Did You See” sounds tired against it's downcast guitar licks, like a song you’d hear someone croon after they’d been wandering a patch of forest for eons.

Right now, Cemeteries might be the best band, not to come out of Buffalo in the past year, but in the past decade. Ever? I say that will the utmost enthusiasm and sincerity. Reigle takes bedroom-produced music to transcendently dark, and at times unexplored heights on The Wilderness. The record baits you via lush guitar and vocals and then thematically you're hooked. There are countless ideas spun into each gloomy track, each bent on a new twist of influence that could keep you listening for days.