Camp Counselors is the haunting side project of Cemeteries' Kyle Reigle. In fact, everything about this release, from the album art down to each and every synth patch can all be described as haunting. While Cemeteries has been a longtime favorite here at buffaBLOG, Reigle's new Camp Counselors album, Huntress, is a batch of songs that we have been eagerly awaiting to give some attention to.
Throughout the nine-song offering, Huntress ebbs and flows. There is a real sense of haze layered throughout these songs - Reigle uses an interesting mixture of vintage sounding instruments, soft percussive hits, and clean synth arpeggios to craft songs as Camp Counselors. Most of the vocals are unintelligible, but it all plays into their haunting atmosphere. All in all, it seems otherworldly, and that's truly the source of the enjoyment one should derive when they listen to Huntress.
"Charyou" is a six minute onslaught of creepy synth backdrops and a sighing Reigle. As I stated before, most everything on Huntress is unintelligible, but again, that's really the appeal. There is some xx influence here, some Radiohead layered far beneath Camp Counselors' surface, and there is even an occasional tinge of industrial snuck into a track or two (for example, the fantastic "Vernal Limb"). "Vernal Limb" reminds me of a dark descent into an abandoned coal mine with The percussion sounding like some sort of mechanism, and the synths literally sounding like they are "hurt." Reigle must be that lonely miner humming to himself in the catacombs.
I'm not usually a fan of songs that run past the five minute mark - admittedly a weakness of mine. But I found the diversity in song length on Huntress to be quite interesting. In my opinion, half of Huntress' beauty is Reigle's ability to harness the power of - to put it simply, and yet somehow also very abstractly - the atmosphere. Take for example "Stained Glass," a song that runs for 1:21, never really establishing a melody, but certainly establishes a mood. Reigle inserts a number of field recordings throughout the album, inevitably making all the more haunting. Despite sounding so otherworldly, Reigle successfully links Huntress back to the "real world," almost tangibly so. You hear the sound of birds chirping, or even the shuffling of items in a room, and all of a sudden, Huntress could be a soundtrack to somebody's life, albeit, a suspenseful or horror-filled life.
But where Reigle succeeds in writing short bursts of atmospheric, mood-establishing genius, he also succeeds in the six-minute-plus chillwave anthems like "An Absence/Fawn" and "Attean." There isn't much more to be said that I haven't already covered, but what we have here is a perfect example of the raw talent that Buffalo has to offer. Don't be surprised when you see this in the top tiers of our best of lists later this year.
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