Catcher’s record, The Fat of a Broken Heart, was in my top five in 2022. Living in Charleston and following a band from Brooklyn’s hype is difficult. I wanted to see of them. I wanted to be in the same room as them when they rained their gloom, when they presented the hot night sweats that they’d created. I wanted to bask in the black. Information about them was scarce. As far as I could tell, I still can’t get a physical copy of the full-length. So it was only the repetitive digital plays of the album that helped me get closer to the source.
In late October when the band announced the passing of one of the members of the band, it hit in a way that felt mythic. I knew so little, only a portion. While I couldn’t relate and attach myself to this one person, it felt like a massive chunk of a mountain was removed and I could only hear about it from far away. I’d never seen Christian play. I only heard his input as part of a larger whole. It hurt in a phantom way, on levels that felt more like empathy pangs for all of the members of the band who had to exist beyond the crisis.
When Catcher announced that they’d be releasing 30 Million Windows on Christian’s birthday this year, it felt right. It felt like the right flower left at the proper gravestone. However impersonal to me, I could feel the impact of the gesture.
Catcher, to me, is bleak. They are harrowing. Their music feels like the existence within a pit of withdrawal, of a hangover. There is very little hope and an anger that shows itself in the pale around the eye instead of the tension within a coiled fist. ‘Skipdrag’ feels like the thrashing awake of a chained mongrel, a rage-filled bestial groan that yanks at its cord until the hands are raw and chipped. Produced with angst at full volume, the guitars and the drums give a spacious claustrophobia, all funneled into a mouth, then projected into a chasm. It feels as if they want to fill the entire room with remorse from corner to corner. It swims in a solid stroke into ‘’Rubberneck’ a more composed palate of loss with violin added to the mix, playing up the baroque and dramatic wreck. Imagine if Cursive’s The Ugly Organ stumbled and found the gutter instead of an art school dorm. This is how 30 Million Windows opens.
These songs feel like the things you see passed in obscured fists. It feels like the fear you know when you’ve stayed out longer than you should have in places you can’t describe how to get to. But there’s a human element to it, a People of the Underground kind of familiarity that the band wields. If these are the spiraling circles that descend into a cold hell collapsing into an ice age, this voice acts as your personal Dante who will sweep wide his arm and show you all there is to behold.
‘Three’ vocally drags like a chain across the bough of a rusted vessel. The pacing is metronomic, chanting hallucinations as if on a truth serum coaxing the confessions. In the way that it blooms, there are a million hues of purple, the shape of a God’s mind no longer worshipped but caterwauling with the mistakes of foul evolution. Then as the thread of the song disintegrates, it buckles into a digital voice, the repetitive bleat of having nothing left. Like a trinary, the pulse of a server with nothing to store.
I love the broken posture of this record. There’s a fair bit of simplicity through this record that builds suspense. There’s a near-soothing nature to the construction of much of the songs, as it props itself up, but it’s the panic of the composure that makes the EP so special. It feels on the edge of bursting, like the fabric has been overworked, tortured to fray. Something always exists in the cellular structure of the songs, mutations that have bent them into a grotesque figure with slurred speech. Within it, there is a power that comes from summoning that which has a name you should not call.
This will be one of my favorite EPs if not my favorite records to drop all year, as it’s a piece of art that celebrates not only composition but decay. There’s an angst in it, a sorrow, a poverty of morals, all existing in a package built with love. This is handed over in earnest, an honest gift in the dark, lit up by the glow of a fraction of the 30 Million Windows. I hope this release finds all of the hands that reach outwards for something dark they didn’t know would sustain them, that reach below for something they wish to drag them deeper. I hope that in finding it, they find it helps them ascend.
For Fans Of: Daughters, Bambara
Check Out: Rubberneck
