Loyal, Heathered Pearls’ debut LP, is, like so many other compositions of an ambient nature, atmospheric background music, best listened to and enjoyed from the understanding that it is a gallery, of sorts, one wherein the listener can browse for moods to operate inside and not worry about being overwhelmed by, say, a transcendent singer or all encompassing musical bombast, things which Pearls avoids entirely for the duration of the album (something which should not be confused for a lack of emotional heft, as will become evident below).

The cuts on Loyal feel like vignettes, little windows into worlds rather than self-contained environments in themselves; it is as if Pearls merely posses and controls a view, rather than crafts one. Many, with their fade in and fade out, carry the feeling of being listened to in media res, as if we arrive through a wormhole or peer into an extra-dimensional looking glass and are given a fleeting chance to observe, like a child’s viewfinder.

We emerge on “Worship Bell” into dreamy, vaguely miasmic drones, large columns of movement gently cut through by the tubular, fuzzy ringing of chimes that eventually become all that is left of the piece when it fades slowly to deep, hazy gray. By comparison, “Beach Shelter” rotates and pulses, sounding like if the clouds of “Worship Bell” had cooled, condensed, and ran in little rivulets across our lens.

“Lower Dome” is colder, more melancholy and stark than what comes before it, and carries a sad beauty, like the eye socket-pocked slumping remains of a ceramics factory in southeast Ohio gently being blanketed by the first snow of winter; “Left Climber” places the same detritus into a brisk, soft, spring rain.

All of these tracks are brief in their duration, and, despite their relative lack of texture and motion, manage to be enthralling none the less. This spell is broken cruelly on “Steady Veil,” whose invocations that something, though it is impossible to define what, is driving, pushing ahead, provides a sense of urgency that had up until this point been lacking. We have dropped in on something with a purpose; sadly, that purpose never reveals itself to us, and we are instead left with something so drivingly monotonous that it almost seems like an experiment, so much so that when one begins to ferret out new elements roughly two minutes into the song’s lifespan, one seriously must question whether or not they exist or are merely a mirage in the crimson desert. Imagine a video of Martian dust being dropped into a lit tank of water against a purely black backdrop, spreading, curling, on loop forever, the tendrils reaching out then spreading from their entrance point again and again, and you have an idea of what “Steady Veil” evokes.

The madness inspired by “Steady Veil” is not the most impressive psychological feat Heathered Pearls achieves. That would be his uncanny ability to, without percussion or coming anywhere close to breaching the space of foreground music, so deftly create an impending sense of anxiety out of the seemingly benign soundscapes that on more than one occasion I almost ripped my headphones off with fear. Now, I am a sufferer of anxiety of the worst kind, so one could argue that I am predisposed to be more susceptible than the average listener when confronted with these harrowing moments, and I would concede this point. However, I am also far more experienced and able to discern and recognize the various creeping tentacles of anxiety; it is the Devil I know, and to be fooled so completely by a song brings about feeling of both violation and admiration, anger at being manipulated and respect for the artist for whom the manipulation comes so adroitly.

“Raising our Ashes” is an odd mixture of comfort and generalized anxiety, combining a soothing melody line with a disconcerting drone, both of which eventually give way and are overcome by the sound of distant helicopters and a long, subdued wailing. Far more frightening is “Ringing Temple (Decreased Version),” whose powerful bells at first invoke images of our introductory glance, “Worship Bell,” but of “Worship Bell” in a far more visceral, ancient sense, before giving way to a calamitous rioting that crests over the peripheries and pitches violently before disappearing and receding back around the edges as quickly as it had came; it is the ambient equivalent of shock and awe, and it is wrenching.

These moments are so powerful as to overtake the entirety of Loyal, and push what at first seems to be little more than an above-average piece of ambient music with an enjoyable, voyeuristic approach to the genre into an interesting, almost sinister pseudo-psychological experiment. Whether one enjoys, or can even notice, the experiment, is dependent on the listener; those who do would be advised to keep a benzodiazepene nearby.

(Ghosty International, PO Box 7120, Ann Arbor, MI, 48107)

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B. David Zarley is a freelance writer based in Chicago. You can find him on Twitter @BDavidZarley.