The flush of synth strings which opens Quirke's Steal a Golden Hail is so arid it’s cracking to pieces. Sat at the beginning of opening track 'Luxury Red Pence', it’s the first of many nasty flourishes which grant the album such unique character. Bright to the point of blinding, Quirke’s sound recalls everything and nothing at once. It’s as if the snowy blizzards of Skee Mask’s Compro were replaced by nuclear ash. The warped corpses of rave classics, barely distinguishable behind a near-opaque wall of distortion and decay.
‘Se Seven 7S’ adds momentum to Golden Hail with a solid beat — though that, too, soon falls into stuttered, but controlled, confusion. The track has an intentional sag in the middle, tumbling wilful listeners into a second-act sinkhole that’s seductively chaotic. It sets a trend for the rest of the album, too; a long but justified runtime, buoyed on the back of a trance-inducing timbre.
‘Sample Devon’ is a little more scrutable; a shameless throwback driven by intense breaks and slow, beautiful chord progressions. It comes off like a jungle remix of Bobby Krlic’s ‘Attestupan’; a continuation of Quirke’s ‘too-bright’ sound in how it recollects the score to a horror film staged at blinding midday. Like Krlic’s composition, it is inert but hypnotic.
Golden Hail has a generally eerier second half, with ‘Xultext Cradle’ an alien transmission that carves an open space through the album’s centre. It is an expansive cavity that fills itself with sonic texture. And, while more terrestrial in its approach, ‘Maybe Again, Crawl Through’ unsettles as well. It’s a pretty but unexperimental wander into wafty ambient territory, disconcerting for its jarring placement in the album’s tracklist.
Quirke saves the best for last with ‘Spinhaunt Coil’. The entire salvo of Steal a Golden Hail is held in balance. It’s a track somehow hard and gentle, brutish and playful. It’s a perfect capstone to the material it follows, doing the impossible and distilling this album’s many qualities into one concise package.
Steal a Golden Hail is available to purchase and stream here.
Words by Andrew O’Keefe