‘CATACLYSM’ opens on a ringing guitar riff, droning chords echoing under the main line to create a wide open plane. Cutting into the dark symbols are played out on the drums, contrasting the more distorted echoing of the guitar with clear, bright notes like stars striking out against the night sky. This is where the beauty of ‘CATACLYSM’ sits in the shining ruptures in the dark; it is also, however, where its danger lies: the lure to focus on the bright light rather than the darkness that stretches from it.
The song takes off with the whole drum kit in play, and Austin Woodcock’s vocals enter the arrangement with the line: “finding gods in painted memories”. Instantly, listeners are delivered into a world of dire hope, clutching onto anything that will propel them forward into the new day. It does not matter whether their memories are real or imagined, the object tangible or turning to dust upon touch, so long as each is beautiful and quells their anxiety over the dawning of another cataclysm.
However, the narrator warns against this and how not learning from the past will soon deliver them into another catastrophe. This cyclical sentiment is explored in the subtle change in tense between the first and second choruses. The first chorus written in the present, looking back on the cataclysm just gone, and the second written looking into the future at another one to come. With a storytelling ability on par with Blue Öyster Cult and Black Sabbath, Gloria masterfully spin a new version of an uncomfortably familiar tale: past quickly evolving into future, future inevitably colliding into the present, leaving us again in the past.
The song pulls back into a spacier, lighter tone with harmonies and a restrained guitar. The grittier rock present in the rest of the track brackets this more psychedelic sound. However, the different leanings speak to each other not only sonically but also communicate with the narrative in its pull between the earthly destruction and the cosmic escapism. Gloria demonstrates the ease with which they can switch between these modes of sounds and storytelling.
‘CATACLYSM’ weaves together the contradictory stories of a world far from ours and the uncomfortable reality that this fictional world is closer to our own than we'd care to admit. But, if we are fated to keep making the same mistakes, falling from one rupture into the next, what better soundtrack than ‘CATACLYSM’ to accompany us in the cycle of destruction and promise?
Ella Wilson-Coates
Image: ‘CATACLYSM’ Official Single Cover
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