Written by: Dave Cantrell

Quite frequently – read (sadly): most often – when a band or artist seeks to reinvent their sound/style, reimagine their creative raison d’être, the results border on the forced (at least) if not tipping altogether into the insipid and not a tad embarrassing (if we may, very briefly before tip-toeing our way back toward our point, mention one Feargal Sharkey circa the post-Undertones mid-80s), making, in the process, a muddle of their legacy. On the plus side, there are at least a handful of cases where that daring drive to step outside one’s fan-expected past and into what is, by definition, a potentially ill-fitting new set of clothes, ends up not just a wise and satisfying decision but, given the results, a brilliant one (and here we’ll reference the none-more-compelling example of Ed Kuepper post-Saints). To that latter category add the Joe Reineke-helmed (with wife Karen Gold-Reineke), Seattle-based Society of the Silver Cross, whose second full-length Festival of Invocations dropped from the ether in June and whereon the remnants of Joe’s former bands the Meices and Alien Crime Syndicate, while shadowishly evident in the DNA (especially that somewhat duskier latter project), aren’t so much Society of the Silver Cross’s stylistic forebears as silent accomplices in terms of drive and authority of purpose so readily evident in this newer endeavor and especially here on their second full-length.

Magickally potent in a steadfast, masterful way, Festival loses zero time in captivating its listener as opening track “Circle Cast Around” arrives inside a keenly drawn shroud, the pair’s baritone/soprano harmony (“the end, is found” is the killer first line) conjuring a mood that’s as matter-of-fact as it is mystical and there you are stunned before you’ve hardly had a chance to catch a breath, so much much so that the prospect of a full-on trance is locked in place well prior to the proper burst of the thing overtaking our senses a skosh before the minute mark, and thus is this record’s immersiveness immediately laid down as a core tenet. As entrances go, it could not be more entrancing. Follow along, you’re in for a rare treat.

From that commanding opener we come to “The Crown,” stepping into your head to the sound of a mildly – if so very effectively – discordant harmonium figure that’s as steady as it is wraithlike from which emerges its author Karen’s vocal, its strength and ultimate vulnerability that of an unextinguishable sylph made to accept its fate in place of love which, yeah, is some heavy existential shit to carry but carry it she does and compellingly, one sensing every ounce of her heart committed to the task of conveying the narrator’s need to at least salvage acceptance instead of the redemption they’d hoped for even as the world falls to pieces around her. Intriguinly powerful? Umm, yes, yes it is and not by half which, predictably at this point as you might imagine, is a turn of phrase equally applicable track after track.

As a sampling: there’s the constantly building catharsis that is “When You Know,” a gently crushing essay on those famous unknowns that haunt us day in day out. There’s “They Are Coming” that propounds upon itself with a thunderous accrual of unleashed tension that at its essence defines this project in what we can only think to describe as an explosively succinct manner. There’s the beautiful “By the Millions” that comes at us like, well, an invocation of sorts that could well be exhorted from the cave of a certain Mr. Cave if a couple spiritual steps beyond, so majestic is it in its mournfulness. There’s “Deepest Sleep,” a 5½ minute piece of slow, cathedralesque spell-making, Karen again at the mic in the middle of some midnight woods as the beast, as it gamely does, desperately resists its own forlornness. And there’s last track “Rajasthan,” seeming to channel the spirit of one of India’s northwest states through the not-unmystical shrouds of their own Washington surroundings, the track’s (makes sense when you think about it) ‘minimalist expansiveness’ invoking all manners of lush, inscrutable conjurations which is to say it’s not just mesmerizing from its core outward but, in its meditative way, life-enhancing. When a piece of ‘pop’ music has you, as this one does, wandering about inside a waking dream where you’re confiding in your own soul every wisp of desire, every abandoned regret, kind of every everything, well that’s a goddamned rarity now, isn’t it?

Stacked like a deck of sonic runes, Festival of Invocations isn’t, in the end, a case of ‘they don’t make music like they used to’ so much as ‘they never actually made any music like this’ and, really, we can’t think of a stronger recommendation. [pick up Festival of Invocations here]