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The way Love Life can fashion something truthful, profound and utterly iconoclastic from sounds normally shrouded in the haunted couture of outright theatricality is one of the more impressive examples in the modern musical climate of substance winning out over style, of passion winning over wardrobe. But while they don't sport black eyeliner and back-combed hair, the Baltimore-based quartet does so many things that could be so easily — and wrongly — dismissed as Gothic. They erect a magnificent musical mausoleum in which they conduct a strange séance, the foursome forming a gathering who hope to encounter something "other" in each other, eliciting it by losing themselves in the communion of rock band. They seek nothing so servile as mere campy cerecloth to drape their craft in; instead, earnestly lost in lives drawn to the depths of dark, they seek, through their communion, to draw some great spirit from their funereal art-rock craft, wringing out the anguished cries of both personal and actual ghosts as they march onwards at a pace akin to a crawl. Playing with feverish levels of intensity, Love Life literally wring out emotions as their songs grind on, wound up on escalating levels of tension. The barometer for such unease is always vocalist Katrina Ford, whose guttural screams never seem less than anguished cries. Following up their excellent debut The Rose He Lied By, Love Life up their artistic ante on Here Is Night, Brothers, Here the Birds Burn. From the moment Ford repeats the mantra "sadness, it comes, I can't let go" in that strangulated wail of hers on opener "Listen Loudly," this is one slow descent into an ill-lit night, celebrating this conceptual and tonal darkness with such grave affection for the grotesque that it downright borders on perverse. But, that Love Life manage to pull something profound out of the fire speaks volumes, rescuing a record from its own funereal ashes by fashioning a craft based on a rawness that hits, on an entirely emotional level, the kind of alchemy usually spoken of in volumes of forgotten lore from long-dead days of yore.
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