SubRosa : More Constant than the Gods

SubRosa: Silver thorns and sirens of the deep

By Christine Leonard
22 June 2016

 Draw the beeswax from your ears and unlash yourself from the mast, there’s no reason to dread the siren song of Salt Lake City’s SubRosa. Painting melancholy portraits with her banshee vocals and enthralling guitar vortexes, Rebecca Vernon stretches a skin of sludge, doom and stoner rock over a gothic post-metal skeleton. The powerful undercurrents generated by twin electric violins, wielded by Sarah Pendleton and Kim Pack, lend a supernatural bent to SubRosa’s epics, which rarely dip below the 10-minute threshold. All the while, the inescapable gravity of bassist Levi Hanna and drummer Andy Patterson bring the atmospheric ablutions back to a terrestrial fulcrum.

“I feel like it’s really adventurous to have a longer bigger canvas to work with and to have a series of movements that tell a story and take people on a journey, rather than just reaching a destination,” Vernon says. “It’s been exciting to build those stories and anticipate how we’re going to make people feel.”

Thanks to appearances with the likes of Kyuss, Red Fang, Deafheaven, and Cult of Luna, SubRosa has established itself as a force to be reckoned with. Two previous releases, No Help for the Mighty (2011) and More Constant Than the Gods (2013), along with their earlier LPs and EP, have hit home with a growing North American and European fan base. While readily admitting that performing in the middle of the day is one of her worst fears, festival-veteran Vernon has no reservations about shedding a little moonlight on SubRosa’s forthcoming compositions.

“The title is For This We Fought the Battle of Ages, and the release date is August 26th. There’s a lot of literature that influenced the new album, but the core and the heart of it is [the novel] We. It’s an amazing old, sci-fi, dystopian novel written in the 1920s by a Soviet dissident named Yevgeny Zamyatina. He was in exile most of his life because of his criticism against Communism and the collective way of thinking. In a nutshell, We is an argument for individual happiness over collective happiness.”

Armoured in the romantic trappings of myth and fantasy, SubRosa’s sprawling, lyrical symphonies do battle with the emotional and psychological demons by holding a mirror up to the darkness within.

“I actually consider myself to be a positive person, but one who’s keenly aware of the vicissitudes of life,” Vernon explains. “Our songs deal with social and political issues and modern problems, like racism and warfare, and I feel compelled to sing about this deep sorrow and feeling of universal suffering in cosmic and poetic ways. I guess we’re trying to look up in the heavens, high up in the stratosphere like a bird’s-eye view, and trying to sing about it almost like the Greek chorus in an opera watching the tragedy unfold on stage and trying to explain how terrible it is, without a message other than – life on earth is really hard sometimes.”

SubRosa plays the Sled Island Music & Arts Festival for two shows June 24 at the Palomino and June 25 at Bamboo.