Sightless Pit are as close to a supergroup as their field will allow. Comprising Lee Buford (The Body), Kristin Hayter (LINGUA IGNOTA), and Dylan Walker (Full of Hell), the band have crafted a document of abjection and hopelessness which combines and solidifies their respective strengths. It comes at the tail of two years of on/off studio time during which the artists have tinkered, tweaked, recorded and assembled stems. The rarity with which they shared studio space is impossible to hear on this record—something cohesive, beautifully engineered and, in its own way, gratifyingly restrained.
The album’s ace-in-the-hole is Hayter—an industrial/noise artist who emerged and shot to relative stardom in a very short span of time, and represents the very best of what the genres can currently achieve. Her compositional input and staggering voice elevate the material on Grave of a Dog to operatic status; and its disruption and disentegration (such as at the end of ‘The Ocean of Mercy’) serve to pull the ear even more sympathetically to Buford and Walker’s glitchier, crunchier sound.
Buford’s influence is particularly notable: a relentless, mechanical heartbeat of distorted drums which pushes forward like a dynamo, inflates the album with pressure, and gives it brittle, burning life. But no one element is more valuable than the other here. It is an album which could only have been made by these three collaborators.
The material presented on Grave of a Dog is profoundly negative—but the accompanying experiential thrill tips it into something affirmational. Like a liberation through loss, this album reaches such extremity, and throws life into such stark relief, that everything feels much simpler under its shadow.
Grave of a Dog is available for purchase and streaming here.
Words: Andrew O’Keefe