Waiting Room sounds every bit like a barebones album that was recorded in an abandoned warehouse on a remote, Icelandic coast. It shows its fondness for 90s lo-fi homerecording, but embellishes that with bloodless digital sounds and mixing-desk manipulation. But more than that, Kathryn Mohr’s album sits alongside a world on the brink, cradling her broken heart.
Though picturesque and breathtaking, Iceland is an appropriate end-of-times setting. Apart from sitting on a volcanic hotspot, the island-nation has recently entered the transatlantic-tourism mainstream: like Portugal, being forcibly beckoned from provinciality relative isolation. Self-sufficient largely since the 9th century, it now has a front-row seat for the seas-are-rising final act despite having little to do with the outcome that awaits. Initially, Mohr feels defiant. “Rated” and “Petrified” take sadistic pleasure in watching civilisation writhe in the flames it lit, cheering nature’s wrath.
“Diver” opens the album with what will soon become one of the album’s signature sounds: a downtuned guitar. Mohr juxtaposes it with her delicate falsetto: thin ice covering the abyss. Static crackles like the sound of stones crumbling into the sea, each rockslide provoked by the microphone stationed close to her fret hand that shrill fingerslides act like thunder. The tone is eerie and ironic: nature’s wrath looms in the fog while a bedroom, indie artist tinkers with her equipment as she sings, “This comfort is bad for your health.” The dull, thudding notes on “Driven” take a circular pattern, like a whirlpool forming. Mohr’s clipped, echoing voice materializes and disappears as much like wind noise as a siren’s warning. Doctored so that she sounds like she’s in reverse, it’s like trying to decode backmasking.
Tape-hiss distorts “Petrified”, which is a deliberately, poorly recorded acoustic stroll that recalls Lou Barlow’s Sentridoh work. It feels improvised yet slightly bluesy, like a student secretly woodshedding: an after-hours practice-room rendition of what they heard on the American Anthology of Folk Music. Though it was released as a single, the grungey “Elevator” turns out to be a sonic outlier. Like early PJ Harvey with Liz Phair’s upper-middle-class sneer, the track confirms the album’s shift from stark environmental warning to Mohr empathising with the planet’s disappointment. She compares one relationship to her arm being caught after a lift’s doors have shut and the car has begun changing floors.
“Prove It” grieves. Suffused with electrical current following a brief, piano-led soliloquy, the remainder of the song tries to paraphrase the helplessness of watching something die. When “Horizonless” returns Waiting Room to traditional instruments, it’s the downtuned guitar again. Mohr can scarcely be heard – humming in horror – above its drone; its notes are more thumbed than plucked from hands too cold to articulate notes. Toward the end, she unspools on “Wheel” by giving a dry eulogy to her own profligacy: “Seconal, absinthe, kratom ash, table grip… razor burn, 13, change of mind”, and for the motion sickness, “Dramamine”.
On its closing, titular track, Waiting Room – so intricately and deceptively assembled – makes its bed and lies down in it. Admiring the beauty, and the waste that it is.
