Markers – Heaven in the Dark Earth
With Heaven in the Dark Earth, Markers submerge the listener into their world of dignified silences, where the slightest movement of fingers on a fret board creates heightened drama
When listening to Heaven in the Dark Earth, the skeletal debut from London guitarist duo Markers, it’s unexpectedly inviting to think of Rockstar’s recent smash Red Dead Redemption 2, a video game of alarmingly maximalist stature. Both are sprawling works in their own right which could easily be dismissed as 'slow', lacking in action, or even boring. But switch the descriptives to those more forgiving – 'meditative' or 'deliberate', for example – and things may just click into place. Just as RDR2 invites the player to lose themselves between moments, in the intimate interactions of a turn-of-the-century outlaw much happier fishing than robbing banks, Markers too submerge the listener into their world of dignified silences, where the slightest movement of fingers on a fret board creates heightened drama. From harmony to dissonance, from nothing to something.
Strictly speaking, Heaven in the Dark Earth is hardly Markers’ first rodeo. It’s about as technically proficient as you might expect from Jason Carty and Jodie Cox, two veteran guitarists of math rock who spent the early 2000s playing in various groups with names like Geiger Counter and Ursa. The eight tracks of Heaven in the Dark Earth – four long, four short – give off the vibe of a one-off: a single album from a chance encounter, or a seasoned project’s back-to-basics approach.
From the album’s proper opener In Amber, a song where the chasmic silences are just as gripping as its uneasy chord progression, you’d think that Carty and Cox had been doing this forever. The whole affair, especially Marine Parlance and closer Muisca, manage to morph and mix incompatible 90s rock elements from acts as varied as Low and Metallica, without sounding too much like either.
That said, one of the album's few downfalls is a deathly self-seriousness. Where the roots of post-rock found genre agitation in the form of field recordings and goofy, diverting titles, the tone poem aspect of Heaven in the Dark Earth – the typically crystalline guitar of In Amber, directly reflective of the title – comes off as unoriginal. But that’s by the by; avert your eyes from the tracklisting, turn out the lights, and lower yourself into these darkest crevices.
Listen to: In Amber, Marine Parlance, Muisca