Review: Eating Flowers - God Was A White-Tailed Deer

It’s a ladder out of my own head. A ladder that reaches upward, straight into soft ambience and droplets of airborne light, where synthesisers and strings congeal like clouds and tonally mutate as winds tug at their edges. But the ladder also points down, crunching into the anchorage of the earth, channelling coarse surfaces and the thrust of gravity-adherent event (avalanches, hail showers). Unlike so much music that works with the allure of “ambient” texture, God Was A White-Tailed Deer never turns entirely wistful or cognitively absent. Beats judder through the lower frequencies (as on “Under The Sun…”) or the drones flicker and rustle like curtains of tin foil “Vertigo & Despair”), proudly brandishing the dirt and burn marks of weathered tape.

None of these tracks linger. The two longest just barely scrape five minutes each. Such brevity means that my listening remains vivid and lucid; the textures never soften under the acquaintance of duration. The distortion on “Out To Where You Are” is never less than dagger-sharp, while even the comparative pastoral scenes of “Snow Country” feel caught in blizzards of erosion and interference. I climb the ladder in both directions simultaneously: my head is rinsed by circumvented overtones as my feet crunch upon field recordings and analogue clutter, trapping myself between vigorous corporeal existence and the allure of upward departure. The music quivers under the tension of the vertical stretch.