Tough Love
It’s been a tough few years for Ulrika Spacek, and Compact Trauma is an album loaded with tension and a sense of cathartic release. The strain of working several jobs to support their art and the demise of their Homerton base almost split the band at the seams, but they’ve produced their best effort out of the darkness.
It’s been six years since the sepia-tinted warmth of English Decoration, the fuzz-filled follow-up to their 2016 debut, The Album Paranoia. For a period, it looked like it might be the group’s last, especially when frontman Rhys Edwards released his debut solo album, Flickering i, last year under the moniker Astrel K. Inter band turmoil, recording relocation, and the global pandemic all conspired against the group. But now they’re back and with a new guitarist in Adam Beach, formerly of Younghusband.
The weight of the last few years is evident in the music, and on the floaty ‘No Design’, Edwards sounds decidedly weary: “Falling backwards when you’re not around/And if the world is broken/Then I hide away in autumn”. Compact Trauma shifts between personal struggles and existential unease: “I’m not alive, nor deceased”, Edwards sings on ‘Diskbänksrealism’, encapsulating the limbo many of us felt during the lockdown. Edwards trades in philosophical ambiguity throughout a lot of the record, a detached poet viewing things from afar, but his wordplay is constantly engaging.
Isolation is a theme that creeps through the record, Edwards lamenting the loss of past friends on ‘Lounge Angst’: “Seems like my friends/Grew up or left”. Compact Trauma feels like a record influenced by lockdown-induced introspection. On the aforementioned ‘Diskbänksrealism’, the reference to the “Bright lights and awkward smiles” of the supermarket evokes memories of when a trip to the shop presented our only form of social stimulation. ‘The Sheer Drop’ reads like a biography of the band as Edwards sings: “Homerton’s caving in/A cut-throat throw out time’s upon me”.
Edwards constructs his anxieties impressively, but it’s not just his writing skills that have expanded; the whole band’s sonic palette has widened. On ‘Sheer Drop’, the plinking rhythms of pulsing synth pads and jittery percussion give way to squeaking, tension-filled guitars. The classic shoegaze elements we’ve come to associate with Ulrika Spacek are there on ‘Accidental Momentary Blur’ and ‘It Will Come Sometime’, with Edward’s voice dripping through like honey. But elsewhere, the band explores entirely new territory, such as in the short siren-like ambience of ‘Through France With Snow’.
‘If the Wheels Are Coming off, The Wheels Are Coming off’ is full of choppy riffs and fuzz-filled distortion before descending into a shimmering, jittery psychedelic conclusion. ‘Compact Trauma’ is similarly evolutionary, starting with a screeching wall of distortion before journeying into a more conventional indie territory and finishing as a gorgeous, soothing lullaby. ‘Stuck at the Door’ is the band’s most ambitious effort to date, an almost eleven-minute epic that features a couple of watery breakdowns and ultimately dissolves into this dystopic hum.
Compact Trauma is a layered affair, full of complex intricacies that reveal themselves slowly, the hooks aren’t immediate, but it’s captivating all the same. The band’s experiments pay off, their sonic diversity enhanced by the atmosphere of tension that oozes through the record. Ulrika Spacek has come through the darkness, but first, they had to embody it, creating something engrossing in the process.