By Will Bishop

The foundations of My New Band Believe and their titular debut album came to Cameron Picton in a fever dream while under the throes of food poisoning, far away from home in a Chinese hotel room while on tour with his previous band, black midi. The name, and a handful of other phrases, became stuck in his mind, eventually coalescing into the project some years later. The music and songwriting very much reflect this, rife with surrealist imagery and lavish sonic cacophony, filled with euphoric highs and long dark tunnels.

Love Story, the first track released off the album, initially reads as a gentle musing on domestic life refracted through little moments. “You sing along to your favourite songs. But you don’t know the words. So you make up your own.” Then a harsh aura builds in the string section, giving way to frightful and nightmarish imagery. “A mеtal spike from the sky. Precisе and poisoned. Somehow avoided me.”

Hopeful and optimistic phrases are spoken like a mantra, beguiling you into peering deeper beyond the shimmering surface. The ostinato — a musical pattern that is consistently  repeated at the same pitch throughout a composition — of Target Practice telling you over and over again “Don’t cry, you deserve this,” has a soothing, almost therapeutic quality — until you start to wonder what exactly it’s telling you that you deserve. The verses reveal a world of pain. The narrator tells you that you deserve what you have given, promising you desecration beyond death.

The towering Heart of Darkness pushes the album’s shapeshifting approach to its furthest extreme. Playful flamenco guitars fill your ears with bright color as the unease of its lyricism mounts. “Open up, I have come too far to run. My, my, my, what have you done?” Picton breathes, pulling back dark clouds with a moment of musical bliss only to reveal night has fallen beyond the veil as you circle a black drain in the sky that spits you back out, eventually lowering you down on the feather of an angel’s wilting wing.

For all its musical virtuosity, My New Band Believe is often reserved, as if hiding in the thorny bramble of its instrumentation. If you follow the vine of a blackberry bush down its ever winding path, counting every overlap, every splintering, every leaf, then it is a complex thing indeed. But, it is internally inaccessible, only offering its outward appearance and the fruits held on its distant edges. It does not offer its innermost complexities, rather, it leverages them into an impenetrable fortress. A yaegaki, fences within fences. But, the album is at its best when it’s letting you in. At times, it can look so impossible. Thorn bushes made of nylon string. Like a non-euclidean horse with legs melting long and tangling together. Then, suddenly, its aestivating worm appendages unswirl, its sinewy muscles tighten back to life, exploding into a triumphant gallop. In those moments, you will believe Cameron Picton can fly. “Speak of the dragon and the dragon shall appear at last.”

Will Bishop is a Cal Poly Humboldt journalism major. He is prone to writing essays about things that bother him, and fictional works about things that also bother him but in different ways. A highly bothered individual, and a lover of cinema, music, and large trees/rocks. He can often be found in the woods, dancing to bring down the sky.