A meandering meditation on 2018’s ECLIPSE from Portland, Oregon’s MISS RAYON.
MISS RAYON: ECLIPSE
[on XRAY RECORDS]
The Blood Wolf Super Moon, coming January 20th-21st, will be the last lunar eclipse to grace our shared, somatic reality until 2021. But it’s not the only Portland Eclipse rife with metaphysical wallops as I, personally, have been in a psychic swell since the last major solar eclipse that swept up Oregon on August, 21st 2017.
However, the most riveting PDX felt eclipse is encapsulated, with fervor, in MISS RAYON‘s 2018 full-length, ECLIPSE. The very record that surely opened more portals in the foreheads of Portland basement dwellers and dizzy-dalliers city-wide, probably more so than the freakin’ moon itself.
Eclipse is akin to cosmic lunacy in vigorous, spastic movements; howls to and from the disco-lycanthropes that hide within.
The “reality-tunnel” I’ve been in since that August eclipse has become more of a redemptive “reality tube,” especially for my metaphysical musings, as I’ve been annoyingly privy to this synchronicity-laden simulation ever since. I asked for it, I suppose, as I performed an absurd ritual beneath that 2017 August solar eclipse in the Oregon wilderness as a means to invoke change. And you know what? I plan to do so again for this upcoming one next week. It’s sure to be one hell of a perfect closer, an apt bookend to my two year long full-time season-of-the-witch as I aim to maintain this new “state of woo” into a stabilized stasis. That said, I’m sure going to get nostalgic for the magnetic lunacy these total eclipses riddled our little lives with, and when I do, I have just the antidote for us somber lunatics: ECLIPSE.
[bandcamp width=500 height=620 album=50548634 size=large bgcol=333333 linkcol=4ec5ec tracklist=false]
For the purposes of psychic spelunking post-eclipse season (“RED PLUM”), or to conjure visitations of our future selves & our dark halves (“SELF MADE MAN”), or anytime one simply swoons for the moon (“ECLIPSE”)–we have MISS RAYON’S ECLIPSE to whet that proverbial woo.
There are synchronous tones and tussles that drip from MISS RAYON’s late-2018 release, ones outside of it just being succinctly and aptly titled ECLIPSE.
At times, bassist Jenny Logan (Deathlist) and guitarist Sabatino expertly kraut-work their machine melodies in a baton death march driven by perfectly powerful and understated drummer, Hannah Billie, as in CAN’T WAIT TO BE WRONG & WHAT TO WEAR. The triangle, it’s three points, all focused as if they were creep-charting darkened waters with perfectly rhythmic sonar. Sometimes, they knowingly allow the haunt, the specter of the song’s form, to will out. But they are always expertly clandestine and darkly magnetic as the entity of MISS RAYON.
There’s a centrifugal force to ECLIPSE’s gravitational atmosphere, sometimes revealing a menacing subterfuge of calculated intention that’s always exciting as it is menacing.
DOMESTIC GESURE and PATRICIA HOTEL features visitations from my personal six-string hero, the late Rick Wilson of the B-52’s, especially. Rick is conjured like an angry ghost, haunting hard with his mutant Mosrite in tow, kicking and spitting through vocalist Eric Sabatino’s restless Rickenbacker. While Jack Nietzche strikes back with the Sharp-shooting, Morricone’d guitar in LONG RIDE.
The titular track and the moral center of ECLIPSE, evokes a somber breather to an otherwise methodical and measured beserker-barrage of an album and I can’t help but repeatedly listen to this track’s haunting resolve. It’s as if my “holy guardian angel” were finally answering my psychic ills.
It’s no coincidence, either, that I would choose to ramble about this release right after my “review” of The WILD BODY’s XOXOX–on the surface, there’s an aesthetic tether musically; the grit and gravitas of bold percussive boom-baps that punch-up a bass-line’s mutant weave, chasing the terrifying treble-laden & oblique guitar structures. But their orbits barely, just barely, cross contaminate their disparate sonic atmospheres.
I may be a bit biased in grouping their outfits as Miss Rayon was introduced to me at a basement show, in North Portland, opening for the WILD BODY. Ha. And both of them had two of my favorite local records in 2018. Go figure. Something strange is thankfully still afoot in the basements of PDX…and thank fucking Christ for that.
In any case, hold the vinyl of ECLIPSE up to the moon when you’re feeling that need to howl after this SUPER BLOOD WOLF MOON ends our lunacy… for a while.
–KEATS ROSS 01/16/19
MISS RAYON LINKS:
SHOWS:
† Jan 16
Doug Fir Lounge
Portland, OR
† Jan 31
Holocene
Portland, OR
† Feb 01
Sunset Tavern
Seattle, WA
About Author
