$22.00

Desert Liminal is a team –– tight-knit, cooperative, and bound by a sterling trust in music’s ability to shine a light into the darkest depths. The Chicago band’s primary songwriter and vocalist Sarah Jane Quillin may be the heart of the project, but as such, she is a heart that beats for her bandmates Mallory Linehan and Rob Logan, and the underground scene that has cradled them all and provided a source of profound psychic exploration and a sense of purpose.

The songs on the group’s third full-length, Black Ocean, primarily reflect on Quillin’s inner life during the chaotic years following the death of a loved one, lost to the spiral of addiction. It was during this time that Quillin cut her teeth playing in the Chicago DIY scene, drumming in Heavy Dreams with her dear friend and mentor Emily Kempf (DEHD). As Quillin explains it, it was music and the adjoining community that bolstered her through the turbulent beginnings of an adulthood “mired in the bureaucracy of navigating the medical system, then death, grief, dissociation, depression and finally with enough time (and DIY shows) healing.”

Black Ocean is appropriately stirring, at times reminiscent of early Sinead O’Connor or late Beach House or contemporaries like Tempers. These songs are brimming with deeply-felt melodies and memorable hooks, equal parts haunted and uplifting –– epic, driving pop music coaxed from swirling violin, synthesizers, live and synthetic drums and dazzling vocal harmonies.

Throughout Black Ocean, the band’s love of music and appreciation for its uplifting potential begins to double back on itself, taking on even more layers of simultaneous universality and specificity. Quillin’s songs are commonly love letters to friends, reflections of shared moments both idyllic and hellish. This in fact extends to her bandmates themselves. “Kid Detroit” is written for Desert Liminal drummer (and Detroit native) Rob Logan, who has expanded his longtime contribution to include synth textures and production on the new record. It details, with stirring nostalgia, a touring experience half a decade ago when Quillin and Logan were both thrashed by heartbreak and loss. “It's funny to miss the times when you were younger and a total wreck,” Quillin says. But this is exactly Desert Liminal’s strength. The melody is bittersweet, catchy and touching and the lyrics are tender and poetic descriptions of this miserable time, abstracted and turned into something frankly pretty. “Black ocean, back I go,” Quillin sings over and over during the chorus. Desert Liminal succeeds in alchemizing these bleak moments into something beautiful and distant, bigger than “us,” a beautiful landscape.

“Call Me Your Wasteland” is an ode to Quillin’s bandmate and vocal mentor Mallory Linehan whose shimmering harmonies and swirling, looping violin and guitar have profoundly deepened the Desert Liminal pallet. Quillin calls it “a simple song that projects my own youthful memories onto Mallory’s endless touring schedule, reminiscing on the search for love and connection on the road.” Linehan’s classically-trained but noise scene-influenced violin playing shines here as a stunning complement to Quillin’s dreaming aloud. It seems to play the part of the “radio love song” that gets turned up loud beneath “a laugh with the band / sounding better than any man.” Linehan’s playing may be familiar from her work writing and composing full-band arrangements for her solo project, Chelsea Bridge.

Fans of Lower Dens, Alvvays, Slowdive, and Midwife will find much to love in Black Ocean’s hypnagogic but dynamic and memorable style. But Desert Liminal are doing more than carving out a space for themselves alongside their contemporaries. These songs are so personal –– they so vividly live and breathe at this particular intersection of people that is Desert Liminal –– that they simply could not have been sung by anyone else.

Desert Liminal - Glass Fate

$20.00

Desert Liminal | Glass Fate

“I don’t need no southbound highway sign to tell me HELL IS REAL”.

This opening line from the debut single “New Tongue” launches us into the sophomore album Glass Fate by the Chicago based Desert Liminal. Glass Fate takes us through a Lost Highway trip into the subconscious of Sarah Jane Quillin’s year while writing this record. The songs form a collective meditation on Quillin’s hope and grief while processing the loss of a parent, the end of a beloved band Heavy Dreams (a collaboration with DEHD’s Emily Kempf), and witnessing the surreal near-death experience of her best friend, Desert Liminal’s drummer Rob Logan, during one of their shows. Channeling this heaviness into soaring and simmering experimental indie rock, Desert Liminal’s sound is marked by Quillin’s spectral vocal melodies layered over warm, looping walls of vintage synthesizer and violin filtered through a distortion pedal array. Rob Logan’s drumming ranges from driving post-punk drum grooves to thoughtful, held back polyrhythms that serve and elevate the record.

Completing this subverted power trio, violinist and prolific noise artist Mallory Linehan (Chelsea Bridge) joined in 2019, perfecting the trio’s sound with spacious strings and tape loops that blend into the warm wash of resonating reverb and delay. A first listen of Glass Fate reveals a band with an astute ear for creating warm, engaging art-pop that entwines Quillin’s eliding delivery around smart hooks and introspective, bordering on melancholy, melodies. The further these songs move from the source they begin slipping into headier terrain creating neck-craning audio fields of droning violins and looped voice that recall Tony Conrad at his most accessible and Haley Fohr’s experimentations with voice and breath. These sounds cohabitate in the liminal space where meaning and reference slowly fade into Jungian archetype and back again through the trio’s strong grasp on solid, reality-affirming songwriting.

A fixture in the deep field of Chicago D.I.Y Desert Liminal has shared bills with varied notable acts like Caroline Polachek, Molly Nilsson, Eyedress, Mary Ocher, The Hecks, Living Hour, and Weeping Icon. The band has been featured in The Chicago Tribune, Indie Shuffle, BIRP!, Various Small Flame and more .

Their first LP on Whited Sepulchre, Desert Liminal will be releasing a new single every month before the release of their LP in November. Originally scheduled for a summer release, the release of Glass Fate was delayed due to an unprecedented vinyl supply chain shortage.

credits

releases August 25, 2021

Produced by Desert Liminal, Robby Haynes and Ziyad Asrar.

Recorded and mixed at Strange Magic Recording Chicago, IL.

Desert Liminal is Sarah Jane Quillin, Rob Logan and Mallory Linehan.