Béret has released his new single White Hole, which will be the last single lifted from ‘Jesus White’. Listen to the track via Bandcamp below.
Béret, the songwriting project of Seattle’s Ian Kurtis Crist, will release the LP on October 18 via Chicago’s Born Yesterday Records. ‘Jesus White’ is a tough and intense post-punk record made almost entirely without drums, which gives it a dreamlike and surreal quality that I find extremely addictive. The minimalist approach creates a powerful starkness and immediacy, as in the last minute and a half of Time Like Fluid, where one chord is repeated with increasing layers of guitar overdubs and rising intensity until it abruptly turns into a high squall of feedback. It’s unrelenting and beautiful.
Here’s a quote from Ian Kurtis Crist about White Hole: The “White Hole” is the end of the line. It’s where one lives when they are lost in self. The exaggeration of self pity and distorted selfish thought process are symptoms of what I view as a mental illness in my own life; a spiritual malady in some form. It has brought me to the gates of insanity and near death. I wasn’t willing to accept help or any sort of solution to my problems that weren’t of my own creation until I had reached this “jumping off point”. This is about my living in the “White Hole”. Consumed by a self-purported world view and standing on the precipice of suffering before diving into spiritual reconstruction.
Crist is an audio engineer, and the record sounds appropriately fantastic, the guitars sometimes crystalline and distant, sometimes violent and slashing with icy halos of feedback, vocals up front and clear. It’s a consistent sonic world but one where no two songs feel identical.
