Searows Dives To Oceanic Depths in ‘Death in the Business of Whaling’
In his 2022 breakout, Guard Dog, Portland’s Alec Duckart paired hushed, bedroom production with reverb-soaked guitars and a melancholic haze reminiscent of stepping inside a memory. Death in the Business of Whaling packs a heavier punch, it’s weight lingering as the record makes no attempt to escape its own intensity, instead learning to live inside of it. Searows relinquishes control and dives deep into the literary seascape of metaphorical hunting and fishing tales, the title itself drawn from Moby Dick: “Yes, there is death in the business of whaling – a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity.”
Album opener, “Belly of the Whale,” extends the titular vision, plunging straight into a visceral, emotionally charged mythic realm. A low, mournful cello swells atop building guitar chords and rising vocals like a foghorn cutting through a thick, misty morning. “Kill What You Eat” explores similar murky terrain in an increasingly confrontational manor. Speaking to survival through images of gutting fish, Duckart weighs the instinct for provision against a current of self-condemnation and the relief in being let down. Lyrics “I’m an outlaw now” spill into following track, “Photograph of a Cyclone,” a search for reassurance in chaos that highlights repetitive cycles within the familiar comfort of one’s own sadness.
The blunt lyricism in “Hunter” perpetuates such cycles with such blatant animosity, “I am a killer with a heart on fire/I'll be the hunter when you tell me I need to be.” Mid-album, “Dirt” steadies the pulse, trading urgency for quiet contemplation and the reconciliation of sitting with something you can’t take back. The intentional repetition from the guitar picking mirrors the inevitability of circling back to the same ground.
As most of his music is shaped by a moody Pacific Northwest upbringing and his own dealt hardships, Searows saves his most devastating moment for near the end of the project. “Dearly Missed” may be the album’s most gut-wrenching track, an aching exploration of loss, uncertainty and the violent ways in which people disappear—into the earth, into their traumas, and into themselves. What begins with a familiar, intentional softness swells into something beyond containment, his voice unleashing a long-pent-up grief as if it had nowhere else to go.
Much like how this record lingers in the air after the fact, not quite focused on landing gently but rather dwelling in that discomfort, its penultimate track, “In Violet,” arrives with the album’s reluctancy to end. Accompanied by unexpectedly uplifting guitars, threading banjo and vocal riffs, it wrestles with disappointment, capturing the sting of failing to measure up to someone or one’s own standards. Reverting back to the calm acoustics the project began with, closer “Geese” shifts focus from the water’s undertow to birds circling above: “Like wild geese flying toward something/You do not have to do good/But you cannot do nothing.”
Searows’ oceanic and literary motifs prove a most accurate vessel for this project—cyclones, hunting and fishing embodying a chaotic catharsis as he personifies the very wilderness and weather his art evokes. The final notes of Death in the Business of Whaling slowly lead the listener back to shore while leaving parts of them adrift in that uneasy tide, confronting what’s being carried through each track.
