It’s tricky to review a drone album, because so much of the music is visceral. Sure, I could throw around some buzzwords — sprawling, languid, ghostly, shimmering, panoptic, dense — but they describe most drone, when you think about it. And sure, there are subcategories (e.g. minimal, synth, field recordings) but nomenclature always seems limiting and unimportant. What is important is whether the music makes you feel, and whether or not it’s boring. These are my two criteria for reviewing a drone album, and San Francisco duo Higuma have struck gold on both fronts with their latest LP, Pacific Fog Dreams.
Now I don’t doubt that it’s infinitely harder to make a great drone album than it is to review one. For one thing, it has to hook the listener in a genre that lacks not only hooks but structure. The opening track on this album, “Pacific Temple,” rises as though from slumber, stacking sticky layers of delay on top of each other with increasing intensity while what sounds like a chanting human voice yells out in the distance. A reverb-rich (of course) guitar ekes out a warbling almost-melody; the static ebbs and flows. When it’s over, you feel that something unspeakably monumental has just taken place. You are hooked.
But once you attract the listener’s attention, you have to keep it. Evan Caminiti (of Barn Owl fame) and Lisa McGee know how to do that, too, since they’re experts at another important aspect of drone music: subtle yet drastic changes. In golf, the harder you strike the ball, the less directional control you have; on especially long drives, even the slightest leftward or rightward deviation might send the ball flying into a rough patch. Higuma sends their (metaphorical) ball straight into the deep rough and then try to putt their way out. The sound of closer “The Veiled Lamp” is the sound of the ball resolutely burrowing itself deeper into the ground, fairway be damned. Meanwhile, we get more howling on “Burning Colors,” and to complete this admittedly strained metaphor, it might be the sound of Caminiti and McGee’s partners waiting at the tee. “Where are you guys?” they call out. Well, we’re deep in the thickets and lost in the haze. A non-answer if ever there was one, but truthful nonetheless.
“Morraine” is among the densest tracks here, featuring echoing guitars that slowly alternate between a couple of pitches. The results are majestic. Indeed, over the course of the album’s scant (for a drone LP, anyway) 40 minutes, Higuma manage to take you places without you realizing that you’re going anywhere at all. Musical phrases go from guttural to trumpeting and back again with only the slightest changes in reverb and pitch; guitar notes cascade against pushy feedback, resulting in a grand tug-of-war that never quite resolves. Of course, it’s about the journey instead of the destination. I’m not sure Pacific Fog Dreams even has a destination; nor should it.
“Crystal Harvest” is more straightforward than “Morraine.” The latter seems to be waiting in the shadows, while the former gets right in your face — that is, until it ends with distinct (dare I say pretty?) acoustic guitar pickings, reflective in their gracefulness but surprising in their delicacy. Again, this music is successful because it contains feelings that it imparts onto the listener. In other words, these aren’t just empty notes being stretched to fill time.
In fact, filling (or “killing”) time is not a problem here. It’s refreshing that Higuma know how to “cut the fat,” so to speak, and they expertly keep their sprawling drones in check. Pacific Fog Dreams is dense, yes, but never bloated. “White Winds” is emblematic of the album as a whole: it’s brief (3:25 run time, briefest on the album) but not rushed, ferocious but not overbearing. As always, Higuma maintain a certain accessibility in their noise; while they might at first sound abrasive, repeat listenings reveal details that cautiously emerge from the fog (I swear I can hear someone singing on “Solstice” who sounds just like Cover The Windows And The Walls-era Liz Harris). As is usually the case with dreams, the “meaning” remains elusive. Maybe that’s the point. Trying to discern “the point” of music like this is about as useful as a 3-wood in a sand trap, which is to say, not useful at all.
