There’s a specific kind of loneliness that happens when you return to a place you once knew, only to discover you’re actually a ghost in your own story. Helen Ballentine, better known in the music world as Skullcrusher, has a new album, And Your Song is Like a Circle, that explores this feeling and slowly becomes it, dissolving into vapour before your ears, leaving only the faint outline of where a song used to be. “Who do I live for / Who do I sing for?” the opener “March” questions under a soft piano, buzzing strings, and transcendent vocal layering.
“Dragon “pulses with programmed percussion that sounds like a drum machine playing in a room three doors down, filtered through the haze and maze of dissociation. “Red Car” nods to Gillian Welch with its line about dreaming of a highway, but where Welch’s roads lead somewhere, while Ballentine’s just loop back on themselves. “The Emptying” closes the album with skeletal guitar and crackling ambient noise.
Songs on this album blur together—melodies evaporate, footholds disappear. If you’re looking for something to grab onto, you’ll find yourself drowning. But if you let yourself sink, you’ll discover that Skullcrusher has built an underwater cathedral where sound moves like light through water, where everything shimmers and nothing stays still.
