See Jenny Logan on OMN Live, Sunday, May 24 at 6pm on the OMN Facebook page.

Deathlist doesn’t do happy. This is one of the best things about band mastermind Jenny Logan’s uncompromising body of work. She makes peerless dead-of-winter music. Middle-of-the-night music. Staring-at-the-sea music. Logan expertly mixes pitch-black bleakness with streaks of devastating beauty, and the results are fractured mirrors of the world we’re all stuck in: dark and weird and teeming with eerie wonder. It’s you’re-alone-but-you’re-not-alone music, which is the best kind of music there is.

On You Won’t Be Here for Long, Deathlist’s fourth LP in as many years, Logan goes looking for the horrible and awesome mysteries beyond the veil. What strange forms lurk behind the fleeting despair and dour moods that define our everyday?

It won’t surprise anyone familiar with her discography to learn that Logan finds an even deeper shade of black in the great elsewhere. It’s a different kind of void, the throbbing sort you see on the backs of your own eyelids: every color at once colliding with every thought at once. It is the place where nothing becomes everything becomes nothing.

“I really wanted to find a more universal way to understand my own particular heartbreak and pain to try and get in touch with something more permanent than myself,” Logan says.

Her search for understanding began by shaking up her songwriting practice. Instead of heading into the studio with a batch of new songs, Logan built You Won’t Be Here for Long around synth improvisations and drum tracks recorded with Victor Nash at Destination: Universe.

“The improvisational origin of the songs is important. I was trying to let go of my ego and tap into something more like dreams or the unconscious,” she explains. “The title “You Won’t Be Here For Long” sort of applies to everything–life, dreams, relationships, pain. It’s all temporary, but it can help lead us to something universal.”

The end result is a unique melange without a permanent address. Like Deathlist’s past work, it flirts with the crimson gloom of goth-ish post-punk–there are noticeable traces of The Cure, Bauhaus and Christian Death haunting Logan’s sound–but there is a hypnagogic quality on You Won’t Be Here for Long without precedent in Deathlist’s catalog. The repetitive bliss of Suicide and controlled squalls of The Jesus and Mary Chain come to mind, but what are milemarkers in a dreamscape?

You Won’t Be Here for Long is really the sound of Logan singing herself into a lucid state. It is the sound of strange drugs washing everything inconsequential from a troubled brain. It is the sound of an impossible vision barely remembered. It is the sound of a sleeping mind trying to find that vision again, failing to find that vision again, but recalling just enough of it to transform its vanishing into something beautiful upon waking.

You Won’t Be Here for Long is out May 29th, 2020
Cover photo by Ralf Rodriguez / layout and text by Jenny.
Mixed and recorded by Victor Nash at Destination: Universe in Portland, OR.
Mastered by Gus Elg at Sky Onion.