The title track opens on a lurch. Six-four against four-four, a time signature that won’t settle, and immediately you understand: Warning aren’t interested in comfort. Thirteen minutes, and the guitar leads carry the kind of mournfulness that sounds less performed than remembered. Around the seven-minute mark it doubles in tempo and Patrick Walker delivers what might be a thesis for his entire body of work: “Trembling and dumb between us / Is the test of a love that I can’t win.” Then it reprises the opening, collapses, ends with “an ever-living, self-defeating horror / That follows me wherever I fall.” Not an arrival. A statement of ongoing condition.
Twenty years since Watching From a Distance. Long enough that most bands who returned wouldn’t have the nerve to open with thirteen minutes of this. Walker spent the gap with 40 Watt Sun, writing a quieter, more nakedly exposed kind of grief, and Rituals of Shame carries those years without making a fuss about them. The voice is more powerful now. More precise. There’s a balance between lightness and weight in how he uses it that’s genuinely difficult to describe; you feel it before you can name it.
“Stations” runs nine and a half minutes and builds toward something, where the title track spends its time not arriving. Aaron Prestidge gets space late in the track for tom work that’s placed rather than added, fills that come from the song rather than over it. Walker’s voice here is the album’s most soaring point, sitting above the instrumentation without straining for it. Lyrically: “Tonight, there’s nothing that can reach me in the world outside / It’s just another vast, aching hunger; an emptiness of another kind.” Persisting through difficulty, the way you do when you’ve stopped expecting difficulty to end.
“Night Comes Down” takes over a minute before Walker enters. Wayne Taylor and Marcus Hatfield fill that space with warmth rather than density, and Prestidge’s low-end thump grounds it without pulling rank. The instrumental passages don’t paper anything over. They hold weight on their own. Walker’s final note lilts upward on the close in a way that lands as simultaneously vulnerable and immovable.
“Landing Lights” is the album’s most deliberate tenderness. The subject ambiguous, which is probably the point. Walker circling the constancy of music, what it’s meant across a life: “Could I ever get beyond you / And where else would I have to go / In the patches of my love?” It draws on the more reflective textures of 40 Watt Sun’s later records while staying inside Warning’s sonic logic.
Then “Teacher” closes it and this is where the album keeps most of what it has to say. A figure offering a reason to carry on despite damage accumulated over decades. The riff is the most desolate thing on the record. It builds to what sounds like an ending, stops, then the band comes back, Walker’s repeated cries underscored by a guitar squeal that the mix keeps in rather than tidies away. “I wanted to learn / I wanted so much / I wanted to try.” That’s it. The squeal, then nothing.
Chris Fullard’s mixing and Adam Gonsalves’s mastering give the album more separation than Watching From a Distance had. The room is audible. The bass sits slightly back from where it sat on earlier records; it’s still there, still contributes to the thickness. Five tracks, just under fifty minutes. Only the title track crosses ten minutes.
Rituals of Shame is out today via Relapse Records.
Photo: Gobinder Jhitta
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