Keith Rankin continues to build immersive worlds with Giant Claw

Working in Death’s Dynamic Shroud over the last few years, Columbus musician Keith Rankin has kept up a staggering pace, every three months recording and releasing a new mixtape as part of the vaporwave trio’s ongoing subscription program. Within this process, though, more pop-leaning songs would occasionally surface that Rankin would set aside, most of which he said were defined by an ineffable quality that he compared with “a bittersweet yearning.”

“And they accumulated in that way, where they were all about that feeling,” said Rankin, who compiled the best of these tracks for the excellent new Giant Claw album, Decadent Stress Chamber, released earlier this week. “And with that, I tried to let go of some of the intellectualization about my process and just home in on that feeling, which is a little abstract and difficult to speak about. … But I was thinking about how music, for me, has served certain healing functions. And I noticed when I was really stressed, I would put on headphones and go to this other place musically, where it was almost this cathartic practice.”

The tracks Rankin crafted in these moments are rooted in a deep love and respect for pop music, favoring comparatively crisp, linear song structures and building on anthemic, radio-friendly vocal harmonies. Rather than playing it entirely straight, however, he stretches, extrudes and scuffs up the form, layering in distorted bass, squiggly synths, and blasts of programmed, death metal-esque kick drums. “I wanted the drums on this one to be less EDM or hyper-pop sounding,” he said. “It’s more of an older drum machine sound where, yeah, sometimes I’m using it in a way that’s reminiscent of metal or speedcore, which seemed like an interesting contrast to have against these sweeter, more melodic pop sounds.”

Beginning in childhood, Rankin said he experienced flickers of the type of escape possible for him in music, recalling the way a minor chord in a Green Day song might send flares ripping through his brain, or the sensation he experienced of being pulled elsewhere on those occasions when his mom would spin Whitney Houston’s soundtrack to the movie “The Bodyguard.” 

“And those were the first inklings of the power of harmony and melody, and the way the mechanics of music could pull me in,” said Rankin, who experienced a fuller immersion when as a teenager he procured albums by Kate Bush (Hounds of Love) and King Crimson (In the Court of the Crimson King) on the same shopping trip – both of which are embedded within the DNA of Decadent Stress Chamber. “I can really lock in on music and zone out, and that’s a sensation I’ve loved since I was young. It’s this pure escapism where your mind doesn’t feel like it belongs wholly to you anymore, and you’re just in this entirely different world.”

In crafting his latest, Rankin allowed that he wasn’t seeking escape from the chaos of current social and political realities, but rather more mundane stressors related to work and finances. Not that he realized this in the moment, of course, tracing the discovery to post-recording playback sessions.

When starting the songs, Rankin would often begin by chopping the vocal sample into tiny bits and then randomly piecing it back together – akin to someone playing with those magnetic poem fridge tiles, shifting and rearranging the words into unexpected new stanzas.

“And as I would play them back, a lot of the song titles were just what I was hearing in those rearranged lyrics,” said Rankin, who compared the process to a sonic Rorschach test, of sorts, with titles such as “Pulled Me in Dark” and “Die Endlessly” inadvertently capturing his state of mind. “And then I would play some of the songs for my partner, Ellen, and she would be hearing totally different lyrics. … And I don’t know if it’s necessarily cynicism, and I wouldn’t really say I’m a pessimist, but life is hard and tragic, and sometimes it’s impossible to not have that stuff weigh on my mind. But it’s not that I’m intentionally trying to be doom and gloom.”

In fact, part of album’s inherent sense of wonder extends from Rankin’s belief that music can still provide a place that exists at a remove from these harsh realities  – a necessary force he traced back through human lineage (“It’s a human impulse that almost goes back to pre-language”) and which he experienced at arena scale some years back while attending a Paul McCartney concert with his mom.

“And I was just really struck by this idea, like, wow, there are so many worse things that these thousands of people could be doing than gathering to hear music, you know?” he said. “That people still were willing to engage with music and art in that way on such a big scale, especially in a modern context, it just seemed like such a triumph. It still does.”