[Cover art by Tekla Vály]
Long ago on this very website, I briefly mentioned my relationship with Watching from a Distance and its “origin story” (See Paragraph Two) within the as-yet wildly silly narrative arc of my life, but I suppose it warrants elaboration given the unexpected nature of this release. Warning came to me at or very near the most impactful time, a time when I was the most ready, willing and able to be embalmed with someone else’s misery as if it could be an internal salve. This was a wee number of years after its official release, at the precipice of the 40 Watt Sun era, and somewhere between obsessing over Dimensional Bleedthrough and playing beer pong on the door to our laundry room that I discovered Watching and melted into its sepia-warm melancholy. The aches and pains felt lived-in and true. The guitar tone was an amalgamation of massively present yet wounded and remote. It cut when it lashed out but mostly stood guard, stoic and brittle. If Warning caught me at the wrong time of night or the bottom of my pendulum, I wept.
Time and life have blunted the initial tip of Watching from a Distance but it remains in the pantheon of albums that have written themselves into my permanent record. All that considered – what am I to do with Rituals of Shame? Comparison is the thief of joy, yes yes, but if you came into a new Warning record expecting an existent joy to be thieved, well, sounds like you’re a tad misguided.
I don’t believe it’s wise to analyze Rituals of Shame divorced from its broader context. Watching from a Distance was 20 years ago, and that is indeed a crucial element at play for more than one reason, but Patrick Walker has also written, recorded and released four 40 Watt Sun albums. At the risk of being chronologically imprecise, you can reframe this as “Patrick Walker has been playing in a different band for 20 years”. 40 Watt Sun’s writing hit a heaviness nadir with Perfect Light in 2022, rebounding only slightly with Little Weight in 2024. Rituals of Shame continues this parabolic trajectory, and if indeed the ideas for these songs were initially conceived for 40 Watt Sun before the Warning rebrand, it tracks, because while these songs DO move with the weight and gait of Warning, their movement is across a stage most recently outfitted for 40 Watt Sun. If the band walked up and played “Landing Lights” in front of a 40 Watt Sun backdrop, I would anticipate widespread brow furrowing from the audience.
This all may sound obvious. “Artist Evolves, Retains Certain Tendencies” ain’t headline news, nor should it be. The POINT here is that when thinking of Rituals of Shame more as a stepping-stone toward a renewed era of Warning, I’m more forgiving of its faults (as few as there may be). This is not so much a new Warning album as it is a 40 Warn- Sun-ning album.
“Rituals of Shame”, the opening title track, does its damnedest to convince you otherwise. The entire first half of the song is the most convincingly Warning material on the album. If the rest of the album had followed suit, this review would be a great deal more effusively positive, but I digress. Patrick’s vocals in the verse are tinged with the same haunted grit of 20 years back, and it’s been almost as long since he has belted with such force. The guitar work is especially good. It’s difficult to tell how much of a difference the addition of Wayne Taylor on second guitar is making – Patrick’s riffs have always sounded like “Patrick riffs” – but the interplay between the two is delicately nuanced, that familiar mix of intertwining harmonies and monolithic chords. I can’t emphasize enough, really, how fulfilling a large portion of “Rituals of Shame” is. It hearkens back to everything that makes Watching from a Distance so special and coats it in a rich, analog warmth. It’s when the back half of the song takes over that the 40 Watt Sun-isms start meandering in, and this time I’m not convinced they are serving the material as effectively as they do in, say, “Carry Me Home” from The Inside Room. Two pervasive compositional tactics are presented and once I noticed them, they were difficult to ignore.
40 Watt Sun in recent years have been touring as a solo act, featuring Patrick Walker performing selections from their discography as well as, on occasion, Warning tracks. Hearing the songs stripped to just guitar and voice it’s easy to see back through the recorded tracks to their genesis. At their core, these are singer-songwriter tunes – sad creative plays a guitar, finds his chords and shapes his vocals from scribbles on a notepad. It doesn’t change when you blow it out to a full band and drape it in reverb and light distortion. Chord goes here, guitar ornaments to next chord, the singer keeps the story going. This is the modus operandi of Rituals of Shame, presented continually. What I recognized as a riff on first listen was just the transition to a new chord. The latter half of “Rituals of Shame” is Patrick emptying his lyrics as best he can via a meandering melody over a heavy, but rudimentary, chordal passage. Is it Warning, then? Were the riffs and song structures of past Warning the growing pains in getting to this final form? I can’t help but turn this idea over and over while spinning this album.
“Night Comes Down” is the most exciting track for the potential future of Warning, and NOT coincidentally it’s the only track on Rituals of Shame that assuages my fear of Patrick Walker being riff-avoidant. The opening section features a deliciously dour lead reminiscent of classic doom mixed with a stately aloofness more akin to Shape of Despair. The verse riff is even a riff, by golly, just a straight-ahead dissonant shitkicker! It isn’t long before the songwriting drifts back into familiar territory, but there’s enough fresh material within this one track that bucks the established trend. To these ears, a successful marriage of Patrick’s natural inclinations as a songwriter with an embrace of established, some might even say well-worn, doom tropes would strengthen the material immensely. “Night Comes Down” is the closest Rituals of Shame gets and it’s a forlorn sigh of fresh air.
Rituals of Shame closes wisely. If there were a song to exemplify the shallow, lonely chasm between Warning and 40 Watt Sun, it’s “Teacher”. Patrick’s vocal lines this time stretch and breathe naturally; the verbiage never overtakes the melody in importance, and while the last paragraph may have spent a fair amount of time lauding the presence of riffs, “Teacher” doesn’t really need any outright bruisers to make its point. I can liken it to “Carry Me Home” (it’s just too good a reference point) in the sense that the Warning-ness, the massive, brooding darkness of it all, does not play second fiddle to the competing lighter elements.
This has been a rather wishy-washy affair, hasn’t it, both the nature of the music and the direction of this author’s opinion? Were you waiting for some definitive, laudatory statement? A pithy condemnation? I have neither, for I simply cannot excise my thoughts on Rituals of Shame from the shackles of my nostalgic attachment to Warning’s previous output, nor can I ignore its unenviable position as somewhat of a bastard in the recent lineage. The magic is there, though. With each new listen I found more of it. When the ending notes of “Teacher” die and the opening crash of “Rituals of Shame” rolls back in, I remember why I fell in love with Warning in the first place. Emotive doom of this
I’m glad Rituals of Shame exists. If Warning ceased recording new material, it’s a worthy closing chapter to their modest story. If it’s the spark that reignites the flame, the follow-up might be something extraordinary. Here’s to hoping the team takes the new material for a spin on the road to stoke that fire some more.
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