Everything about Portland’s Muscle and Marrow suggests rough, ugly physicality. There’s that name, for starters, but the music that Kira Clark and Keith McGraw make feels like it’s been hewn out of hardwood at great personal cost to the makers. Armed with only the tribal tum of McGraw’s drums and Clark’s moaning guitars, the pair create songs that seem to tower over them with a power greater than their own, Clark’s spectral voice loose spiraling around the sides but unable to escape orbit.
Clark lost a family member while she was writing Muscle and Marrow’s second album, Love, and that sense of desolation—of the opening of a new and uninviting space having just opened—permeates “The Drooling Mouth,” which we’re premiering this morning. It’s a middle-distance stare into the abyss, yes, but loss is only made possible when you have something to lose. Love, then, even in absentia, is what drives the song.
“It’s cathartic and alluring for me to delve into feminine madness because, of course, that character is inside me somewhere all of the time and to give her permission to surface in my art is powerful,” Clark says of the album’s creation.
Let yourself go and give a listen below.
Love track list
“My Fear”
“Black Hole”
“Womb”
“The Drooling Mouth”
“Sacs of Teeth”
“Bereft Body”
“Light”
Love is out May 27 via The Flenser.
