Deep Below’s first track is titled “Hibernation.” “A winter breeze blows through my mind,” intones a colourless, dispirited male voice. The ensuing lyrics are similarly bleak. “Trying to warm myself with the memories you’ve left behind, Deep inside this hole bitterness consumes my soul, One day I might wake up but I know it won’t be today.”
Musically, the setting for this despair unambiguously evokes The Cure – themselves recently reanimated with last year’s Songs Of A Lost World album – around the time of their 1980 to 1982 Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography albums. Consequently, the building blocks of the mostly stately Deep Below are unavoidable; nothing is hidden. The early Modern English and Belgium’s The Names come to mind as well. The final two tracks deviate from this approach: “Nature Break” is thematically more upbeat and – though still Cure-ish – has a greater propulsion; closer “Sleepwalking” nods to Cocteau Twins around the time of 1984’s Treasure. It is all very early- to mid-Eighties. Presumably, the suitably 4AD-style sleeve image is no coincidence.
The fourth album by Rotterdam’s Rats on Rafts – there is also a collaborative album and a couple of live sets – departs from what came earlier. Deep Below follows up 2021’s Chapter 3: The Mind Runs A Net Of Rabbit Paths, a bizarre, musically volatile concept album addressing paranoia, hidden state agendas and climate breakdown. Before this, 2015’s relentless Tape Hiss, an explosive mash-up of signifiers such as Butthole Surfers, Chills, Echo & the Bunnymen, The Fall and Gang Of Four. More accessible, straightforward and focussed on melody than either, Deep Below represents a conspicuous step off the accelerator. The agitation has been excised.
In sacrificing their feverishness for a more measured approach, Rats on Rafts have made an album with few twists and turns. Maybe they have matured? The test of whether Rats on Rafts are wholly streamlined will come in a live setting, where it will be revealed if they are now all about the restraint of Deep Below, or whether the frenzy of yore can be amalgamated with the new-found moderation.
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