Raspberry Bulbs, a project fronted by Marco del Rio, blew up some conventions on its initial release, last year’s Deformed Worship. It’s hard to believe that album came just a year ago. What makes it so difficult to believe is the release of this follow-up record, Privacy. The notion of prolificacy isn’t the surprise here. There are plenty of bands capable of knocking out a record once a calendar year. What’s amazing about Privacy is the major leap forward it marks in just 12 months.
Del Rio, once of black metal band Bone Awl, is taking Raspberry Bulbs in a new direction, one that blurs the line between rock and metal, between heavy and light, between punishing and infectious. After his initial release as Raspberry Bulbs, the solo effort titled Nature Tries Again, Del Rio assembled a five-piece band, and Privacy shows just how much that unit has cohered and expanded its sound. Privacy is an album deeply interested in texture. Between full songs, we get interstitial sound experiements, each named with a roman numeral. So you get the fuzzed-out, distant pulsing of “IV”, or the moody synth runs of “VII”, or the troubling skitter and swell of “IX”. These tracks don’t feel so much like breaks or interludes as much as what’s left in the rubble behind the fuller compositions here. There numbered tracks are like the shadows burned into walls after the blast.
Each of these songs does explode in its own way. “Lionhead 1” charges ahead with slashing guitars and a rumbling rhythm section. The separation between the white-out treble of the guitars, the rumble of bass and drums is melded by Del Rio’s howling in the middle of the mix. “Light Surrounds Me” starts with the rhythm section, letting the bass line rattle out into space, before a blistering guitar hook slices its way into the song. “Nail Biting” is a chunked-up, hard-hitting bit of noise-pop that sprints its way to a series of full stops, before unleashing its full power towards the end of the track. Closer “Big Grin” shows the band’s sound as an expansive, slippery thing. It peels back the fuzz on the guitars, smoothes out the bass, and lets the drums deliver a propulsive beat (one that recalls Modest Mouse’s “Trucker’s Atlas”). This newfound sense of space — the song is far and away the longest here — shows just how far out these troubling echoes can ripple. Del Rio still growls deep and low, but it’s a sound that surprisingly rises up and out of the song rather than clawing into the turf of it.
This is the great trick Raspberry Bulbs pulls off. Privacy is, without a doubt, a heavy rock record, full of punishing riffs and paint-peeling screams. But it’s an album that separates heaviness from darkness. These songs, for all their black-hole density, still have a bright propulsion to them. Part of this comes out of the thematic interests of Del Rio and the band. Sometimes, it’s hard to make out what he is screaming at the center of these songs. The instrumentation shares equal billing, but where others might sound like they were screaming over the fray, Del Rio seems to be screaming into it. The thickness of the sonic layers presents Del Rio as a voice isolated, cut-off. But the sunburst quality of them, the way they sound both aggressive and, strangely, joyful, suggest that these aren’t songs that push against isolation, but rather see the potential in it. This is an isolation not scraped out but full, one not of separation but of possibility.
In its finest moments, the album not only twists out expectations of how to see and feel isolation or separation from social constructs, it also separates aggression from anger. These songs charge forward undaunted, but these are songs uninterested in the kind of masculine expectation of anger often rides sidecar with heavy rock music. Raspberry Bulbs decode that connection between anger and aggression in favor of aggression as a sort of ambition, as a means of discovery. You can feel it in the lightness Del Rio can inflect into how screaming, even at its most intense. Sure, there are moments where his howling sounds like what you’d expect from a singer with a black metal background, and in those moments the message gets a bit muddled. Overall, though, Privacy expands on the intentions of Deformed Worship and adds a new focus and drive. It’s an album that makes us question our expectations of heavy music and, at the same time, our relationship to the scene around it, to social expectations, to people. Raspberry Bulbs aren’t reaching out on Privacy, so the fact that this sort of exploration of isolation does connect, in ways both visceral and intellectual, is an impressive feat.