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Give Up The Roast: Gaslight Coffee Roasters’ Fazenda Passeio vs. ‘Sunbather’ by Deafheaven

Give Up The Roast is a column that collides delicious caffeine with wild thrashing a la a bi-monthly coffee and punk album pairing — the perfect combination  for perking you up during that midday slump. Here, columnist Shannon Shreibak investigates all of the notes, from fruit rinds and spices to perfect fifths smothered in grinding distortion. So come on all you coffee shop novelists, DIY freaks, and connoisseurs of fine taste — keep your mind here in the GUTR and catch a buzz with us.


How do you mourn something that was never real?

Kicking the ol’ coffee column off on a painfully self-aware note? Hell yeah, but it’s a valid question; one that begs for an answer nearly every summer, as the melting of spring makes way for the slow burn of sunlight and sentience.

While summer is rife with romances suspended in moon glow air and nights that inexplicably bleed into day, the season also boasts an undercurrent of reminders of all that’s changed. Pangs of loss creep up tanned spines. A tad more weight bears on freckled shoulders.

How does one lament for relationships gone unconsummated, memories never burned into recognition, and the inevitable misfires that leave us fumbling into the future?

These are the questions that occupy my mind during twilight bike rides through my city; as I guzzle coffee until my heart feels like it’ll flutter out of my chest; and anytime I blast Deafheaven until my ears wave in surrender. This week’s installment of Give Up The Roast is skin-diving across those pesky things called feelings in the name of musical reverence and caffeinated exploration. We’re gonna talk coffee, we’re gonna blare some tunes, and we’re probably-definitely-maybe gonna get misty eyed.

BEHIND THE CURTAIN  (BACKGROUND)

Feelings are a rascally lil topic that doesn’t find its way into my everyday vernacular all that often, let alone in my writing. Sure, I can openly fan girl the hell out and proclaim my undying love for coffee and bikes and music and all of the things in this world that make me happy, but the dark stuff? That’s a type of hardcore that I still have trouble embracing.

After years of avoiding coping with death, heartbreak, and disappointment, I stumbled into a survival strategy. As I pored over Henry Rollins’ poetry book, Black Coffee Blues, I stumbled upon a passage that hit me right in my bleeding gut.

“What goes best with a cup of coffee? Another cup.”

It’s such a basic proclamation, but it felt groundbreaking to an emotionally ailing teenager crippled by loneliness. Finally, I had found someone who shared my passion-turned-reliance on coffee, someone who used it as an emotional release, a freshly roasted escape. Forget tumblers of scotch and cartons of cigarettes — coffee became my vice of choice.

Since those dark days, I’ve created a tradition in which, at the turn of every summer, I bike the length of Chicago’s Lakefront Trail from the time the sun begins to wane until my bike and I are swallowed by intolerable darkness. It often starts as a frenzied ride, much of it spent squeezing past bottlenecks of oblivious bikers and ambling children and chirpy stroller soldiers. But once that hard-fought battle is won, there’s miles upon miles of buttery pavement. One album that has accompanied me on this ride time and time again is Sunbather by California black metal lords Deafheaven.

BRASS TACKS (THE COFFEE)

I gotta honor my Chicago roots yet again for this GUTR installment; partly because of an ill-fated coffee shipment crawling its way from San Francisco, mostly because I’m a procrastinator that needed to desperately clutch some new grounds before I slipped into caffeine detox. Mishaps aside, Deafheaven coupled with Gaslight Coffee Roasters‘ sweet and nuanced Fazenda Passeio (Brazil) makes for one indisputably gruesome twosome.

Meticulously branding their topnotch brews with simple and sophisticated packaging (I mean, just LOOK at their packaging), Gaslight has become one of the most lauded craft roasters in the Second City and beyond. My brew of choice from the joint is Fazenda Passeio. Making its way from Brazil to the Windy City by way of a partnership with Trabocca Importers, Fazenda encapsulates the essence of its origin country. As wth Deafheaven’s music, each component of Fazenda introduces itself with grace and care. Requiring painstaking harvesting and processing, the attentiveness to the coffee beans make for a clean, premium roast.

The result of a same-day harvest and pulping process (to prevent fermentation) is a pulped natural, or “Brazil natural,” brew. With no trace of trite peanutty notes or a bottom-heavy espresso-like weight, Fazenda is an astounding departure from the profiles typical of Brazilian coffee. This coffee sidesteps typical flavors typically associated with the region by barreling an initially sweet head and then tapering off into a complex acidity and clean finish.

WHITE NOISE (THE MUSIC)

Deafheaven had just passed through their stage of infancy upon the release of post-metal masterpiece Sunbather in 2013. The group dove even deeper into cacophonous black metal conventions but punctuated the doom and gloom with bright, pop-influenced instrumentals. The result of this interplay between hard and soft; desperate and triumphant; and desire and dejection is one of the most beautiful warts-and-all display of musicianship released in recent memory.

What Deafheaven does so incredibly well is combining the nuances of post-rock instrumental bands like the Six Parts Seven and Explosions in the Sky with the relentless vocal attacks of black metal. George Clarke’s merciless hisses spray across tapestries of murky guitars and battle hymn drums. Songs fracture into genuflections to post-rock and shoegazing bridges without losing the band’s black metal bite.

The most powerful aspect of Deafheaven’s music is the band’s ability to make every single song — and in turn, anything that the listener is doing while listening — mount in triumph without undermining the last. Vocalist George Clarke wails through as if he’s trying to shake the heavens. Each lyric is a grand proclamation left out to bleed before marveled eyes. Every guitar riff is summoned like it just might be the last one heard on earth.

“Irresistible,” clocking in at three minutes of brutally raw instrumentation, is the most authentic display of Deafheaven’s formula at work. The track follows up “Dream House,” an ebb-and-flow rumination of “what could have been” inevitably yielding to “what will be.” “Irresistible” hums and rolls through finger-picking guitar riffs until a fragile piano melody rolls into the mix. It’s the sound of a summer breeze that you never thought you’d live to feel.

The power and the glory of “Irresistible” — and really all of Deafheaven’s work — is its ability to be anything to everyone. Its sparseness presents the listeners with a blank canvas ready to patch any open wounds. Sure, this might be a classic case of projection, but Sunbather is an album that never fails to remind you — the listener, the only one that matters in this moment — that not only you are important, but also the fact that you’re listening to this album is important.

Whatever you do, just make sure it’s just that important to someone. And that someone had better be you.

Column by Shannon Shreibak. Go forth and be loud with her on Twitter @ShannonShreibak.



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