Lake Ruth - Hawking Radiation Lake Ruth

Next up on Feral Child (and in collaboration with Dell’Orso for CD) comes the wonderful new record by LAKE RUTH. Their third album and first since ‘Birds Of America’ in 2018. Vocalist and lyricist Allison Brice puts the gap between releases down to the interruption of the pandemic and the other two of the members making recent interstate jumps!
 
Working with melodies first, Allison knew she wanted a celestial and cinematic narrative to this album, from there threading and interweaving three key strands of influence into the stratosphere. This means that the tracks generate a constellation of tales with many of the lyrics inspired by the voices and tales on the sorrowful podcast about Heaven’s Gate (the cult where the victims fatally believed they would graduate to an alien spacecraft behind the Hale-Bopp Comet).
 
Second and third to this universe in terms of thematic inspiration are the science fiction novel ‘Children Of Time’ by Adrian Tchaikovsky and the 1920 print Angelus Novus by Paul Klee, in particular Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of this ‘angel of history’ regarding the unceasing historical cycle of despair.
 
Of the lyrical laces Allison explains: “A lot of the songs are about the survivors and the bereaved at Heaven’s Gate whose stories really moved me. I wrote about Nancie Brown (who lost her son David Moore) in ‘Potalaka Listening Station’; Terrie Nettles (daughter of cult founder Bonnie Nettles) in ‘Take Me With You’, plus two songs about Frank Lyford and Erika Ernst. They joined the cult as a young couple, and close to the end he got out - but he could not persuade her to leave, and she died in the mass suicide in California. When you listen to Frank speak, it's heartbreaking - the trauma is so evident in his voice. 
 
Visually the themes are reflected in the cover of the album also, mirrored especially in the first verse of ‘To Erika’: “I’m looking upward to the sky/ in one direction, on the chance that you are/ posed in Orion overhead/ while I’m here imprisoned on the surface”. The other song – ‘From Erika’ - are essentially her last words to Frank. 
 
‘Hawking Radiation’ meanwhile is a title that Hewson wrote referring to the energy emitted by a black hole after it consumes something. The black hole is a symbol of the cult but those lost to it are not lost forever, living on as memory. It seems apt as the title of the album.
 
Contrary to what might be deemed overwhelming subjects are Allison’s ‘hot-knife-through-butter’ seraphic vocals, her melancholic intonation trading blushes with the guitars’ ripple of baroque pop. There is a lightness of touch in the skittering drums too, some touches more familiar to fans of 60s bossa nova.  All three members of Lake Ruth have been in other groups – Allison Brice in Eighteenth Day Of May and The Silver Abduction; Hewson Chen in The New Lines and Matt Schulz in Holy Fuck. It’s an effervescent combination that waltzes and flashes like perplexing trails in the night sky.