Having things in the right place counts. Beyond a matter of doing everything just right, of being a tidy person or of a mathematical obsession. It can be a manifestation of a lot of work, of spending a lot of time together, of an understanding that materialises beyond chemistry, a series of things. The Moth, Cancer House's debut album, recalls Slint's Spiderland. Beyond the aesthetics, the sound, the genre. The instruments are arranged, everything happens at the right moment. There is rigour. However, what manifests itself most powerfully is the exaltation that what is being heard could not exist in any other way. Any piece out of place would cause a feeling of displacement, of disorder. Quartet formed by Keeyan Haack, Lily Sharatt, Alex Furrh and Whitney Johnson (perhaps the best known of the four, with albums on Drag City and International Anthem), they come from Chicago and embrace the current indie fascination with the sounds of the 1990s such as slowcore and post-rock. If the precision recalls Slint, the places where the voices travel recall Bardo Pond (Lily's voice, above all, always seems to be somewhere else, an underground beyond), but the tone, as to what Cancer House sound like, does not recall anything in particular. It is a particular sound, sleepy like that of Codeine, without the fascination of drug-induced languor, that aspires to continue in that state, to perpetuate it, to make it even greater. It seeks what travels with the drowsiness and after it. A special characteristic. It comes from playing together for a long time, from progressing as a unit. It goes beyond the sum of the parts, the sound of Cancer House on The Moth exists as self-medication. Flowers Over There is heard as the greatest example of this, the voices flowing, appearing in sequence without combination, while in the background the music seems filled with sounds, more than instruments -, sounds that warm a kind of torment: which will be, it appears in the form of a scream, when least expected/when most expected, as in Slint's Good Morning Spider. Given everything happening around, music today has a fundamental role. As a manifesto of unease, as resistance to what is coming. One can protest against everything, just as music can be a manifestation of that state, better, of a state in which we can find ourselves. The anaesthetic sound of Cancer House is the sleep that keeps us awake, the closed curtains of a room from which we cannot leave, but also where we cannot sleep. Just being in bed, accepting something akin to defeat.
Their precision, the enchantment with this state, of how they prolong it, is a great victory. It is not easy to give a performance with original music in 2026, especially when it refers so much to the past. They manage it. AS.