BeatRoute Magazine Alberta print e-edtion - June 2016

SUBROSA
silver thorns and sirens of the deep
by Christie Leonard
Draw the beeswax from your ears and
unlash yourself from the mast, there’s
no reason to dread the siren song of
Salt Lake City’s SubRosa. Painting melancholy
portraits with her banshee vocals and enthralling
guitar vortexes, Rebecca Vernon stretches
a skin of sludge, doom and stoner rock over a
gothic post-metal skeleton. The powerful undercurrents
generated by twin electric violins,
wielded by Sarah Pendleton and Kim Pack, lend
a supernatural bent to SubRosa’s epics, which
rarely dip below the 10-minute threshold. All
the while, the inescapable gravity of bassist
Levi Hanna and drummer Andy Patterson bring
the atmospheric ablutions back to a terrestrial
fulcrum.
“I feel like it’s really adventurous to have a
longer bigger canvas to work with and to have
a series of movements that tell a story and take
people on a journey, rather than just reaching
a destination,” Vernon says. “It’s been exciting
to build those stories and anticipate how we’re
going to make people feel.”
Thanks to appearances with the likes of
Kyuss, Red Fang, Deafheaven, and Cult of Luna,
SubRosa has established itself as a force to be
reckoned with. Two previous releases, No Help
for the Mighty (2011) and More Constant Than
the Gods (2013), along with their earlier LPs
and EP, have hit home with a growing North
American and European fan base. While readily
admitting that performing in the middle of the
day is one of her worst fears, festival-veteran
Vernon has no reservations about shedding
a little moonlight on SubRosa’s forthcoming
ROCKPILE
compositions.
“The title is For This We Fought the Battle
of Ages, and the release date is August 26th.
There’s a lot of literature that influenced the
new album, but the core and the heart of it is
[the novel] We. It’s an amazing old, sci-fi, dystopian
novel written in the 1920s by a Soviet
dissident named Yevgeny Zamyatina. He was
in exile most of his life because of his criticism
against Communism and the collective way of
thinking. In a nutshell, We is an argument for
individual happiness over collective happiness.”
Armoured in the romantic trappings of
myth and fantasy, SubRosa’s sprawling, lyrical
symphonies do battle with the emotional and
psychological demons by holding a mirror up
to the darkness within.
“I actually consider myself to been a positive
person, but one who’s keenly aware of the
vicissitudes of life,” Vernon explains. “Our
songs deal with social and political issues and
modern problems, like racism and warfare, and
I feel compelled to sing about this deep sorrow
and feeling of universal suffering in cosmic
and poetic ways. I guess we’re trying to look
up in the heavens, high up in the stratosphere
like a bird’s-eye view, and trying to sing about
it almost like the Greek chorus in an opera
watching the tragedy unfold on stage and
trying to explain how terrible it is, without a
message other than - life on earth is really hard
sometimes.”
SubRosa perform at Sled Island Festival from June
22nd to June 26th in Calgary, Alberta.
BEATROUTE • JUNE 2016 | 33