Pitchfork

While the lyrical concerns remain sadly relevant, Terrestrials can’t help but feel stuck in time.

While the lyrical concerns remain sadly relevant, Terrestrials can’t help but feel stuck in time.

While the lyrical concerns remain sadly relevant, Terrestrials can’t help but feel stuck in time.

Coin-O-Matic follows a similar script as older Deer Tick albums: a beer-swilling song paired with a somber one, neither fully inhabiting the space they claim.

Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! makes one or two schematic tweaks to the chassis they’ve built, resulting in a smoother, more welcoming ride than usual.

While the new album took shape at a proper studio and is a fabulous headphone listen, filled with washes and vibrations and rich stereo swells, it still feels like music for the open air, mixing with the local environment and stretching to its own horizon like water seeking its own level.

Building on their work as individuals, where their training sits comfortably in the background of tactile experiments with synths and tape machines, the trio returns to Oliveros’ central insight. Together, they remind us how nourishing collaboration can be.

There’s plenty of gorgeous sound design to get lost in, like rubberbanding delays in “Skylight” that give the effect of factory machinery imploding, or the timbres that open “Telescoping,” which mirror a Mellotron, a flute, and a choir all happening at once. But let your mind wander, and Carlile and Doran’s digital wrangling blurs into a colorful, reverberant hum.

Filled with lyrics that figure the world as place both vast and small, the album is the kind of monument to deeply felt emotion that fans of Ana Roxanne, Solange, Weyes Blood, and Fiona Apple will hold close to their chest.

Magazine, though, is to me a tremendous next step, as YHWH Nailgun find how much structure and sophistication they can fit into very tiny spaces. If you thought the rototoms were a gimmick, even a good one, they’re gone; if you thought Borzone’s words were inscrutable, they have new relevance and urgency, motivational slogans for the dispossessed.