Abel finds ways to dull the pain with ‘Dizzy Spell’

In some ways, Abel can trace its dense, shoegaze-inspired guitar sound to the chronic pains and migraines singer and guitarist Isaac Kauffman has experienced since childhood. 

“And I think that comes through not in the lyrics, but in the sound,” Kauffman said in a mid-June Zoom interview. “I like noise because it’s something that takes you somewhere else. It’s something where, if I have a headache and I make noise, then I’m not thinking about the headache. I’m thinking about the sound. And that’s something I want the audience to feel. I want to take you to a different space. I want it to make you feel something different.”

Kauffman and Co. accomplish just this on the Columbus rock band’s remarkable new album, Dizzy Spell (Candlepin/Julia’s War Records), which the five-piece will celebrate in concert with a release show at Ace of Cups tonight (Thursday, June 27). The album kicks off amid the crushing buzz of “Dust II,” which Kauffman classified as “a Hotline TNT rip-off” but that also carries echoes of My Bloody Valentine. “Rut” follows and expands on this sonic scope, Kaufmann singing about sinking in place as a trio of cascading guitars weave together and arch steadily skyward. Though dense, the musicians consistently build pockets in the songs that open up like the eye of a hurricane, heightening the intensity of what follows. Witness the album closing “Wanna,” which slips into a temporary lull near its midpoint before the guitars come crashing back in – the equivalent of a cracked sonic dam experiencing an abrupt failure.

“I’ve always been Abel’s producer, and I think that’s something that came naturally with worrying about production,” said Kauffman, who’s joined in the band by singer/guitarist John Martino, bassist Noah Fisher, guitarist Brynna Hilman and drummer Ethan Donaldson. “Pushing across a full sonic wave of pure noise throughout the whole album would have been such a challenge that it was only natural to fall back into some quieter parts.”

It helps that the band’s songs all essentially start as campfire tunes, Kauffman recording solo acoustic frameworks that the musicians later build out into towering rippers. And the songwriter credited the growing level of collaboration within the group for the sonic leap taken on Dizzy Spell.

“I think we’ve seen ourselves mature as a band, where we’re taking more time to think about individual parts,” Kauffman said. “We used to be more focused on replicating what I was creating, where some of the earlier Abel stuff was all me, and I would create the melody, the riffs, the bassline and even some of the drum fills. But with this album we wanted to progress and make it more of a collaborative effort.”

Kaufmann acknowledged the challenge of relinquishing some control but said doing so allowed the collective to better “hear every corner of the space.”

Lyrically, Kauffman still operates on his own, often writing in short, stream-of-conscious bursts, with the meaning of what he’s working through in the moment sometimes not becoming clear until weeks or even months later. On Dizzy Spell, songs touch on everything from the singer’s lifelong struggles with anxiety to the passing of his grandfather, who died early in the writing process and turns up on the song “We All Go to Heaven” dispensing some brutal planetary truths.

“The main point of reflection in that song is from a time my grandpa visited, where we were going to get some ice cream or something, and he brought up this point like, ‘Hey, I think you guys are living in the worst time to live in. The planet sucks. This is not a good place to be,’” Kauffman said. “And that was maybe a year before he passed, and it just resonated with me.” 

Similar downward tugs exist throughout the record, with Kauffman singing about a world sinking deeper into chaos (“Smells like burning flesh,” he offers on “Rut”), the struggle to gain footing amid the relentless crush of capitalism (“Making money for my grave”) and the existential sadness that can strike a person down out of nowhere (“You wanna cry/But you don’t know why”). And yet, the music maintains an urgent, upward pull, the instrumentation often serving as a counterbalance to these more desperate words in a way that, given time, can occasionally have a transformative impact.

“I really like having that contrast in the music and I hope it makes people feel weird,” said Kauffman, who recalled writing “Rut” early in the pandemic, at a time when he was struggling with his career path and feeling like he wasn’t in the place he needed to be. “And we’ve been playing that song since 2021, and now it’s become almost calming to me. Yeah, it’s very relaxing.”