The thing about ambient albums is that few people really care about who made it. It’s more about the function of the music than anything—to center your mind in a moment of panic or simply take you where you haven’t gone before via the ebbs and flows of the music’s harmonic, textural composition. Former frontwoman of Irish grunge band Bitch Falcon, Lizzie Fitzpatrick’s latest release under Coolgirl leans more towards the latter than anything.
Road Closures doubles as a lost vintage soundtrack to a B-movie shrouded in horror and to a deserted spot where nothing grows, nobody stays, and even the presence of a person can feel like a mirage in itself. “Marked Walk” sets the scene with soft synths resembling passing clouds, the sun aiming to burn your skin, if not careful, and the waviness of hot air obstructing one’s vision. On the other hand, it also sounds like being on a whole different planet—a planet that is largely anonymous and monochromatic. The soar of synth stabs around the one-minute mark is both breezy and mysterious, setting up the intro theme for what will likely be an adventure or a slight trip. Either way, it feels like nothing is happening because nothing is quite there. You’d think that this picture would offer a sense of calm and ease, but such assumption gets easily thwarted by the more rhythmic “Pitch Legs,” where underneath the field recording of what sounds like an engine or a train track, brassy synths slowly build up and overpower a repetitive, dissonant electric piano chord.
Venetian vocal samples cut in and out over rumbling minor chord bass synths on the dark and droning title track. “Road Closures” is when an ambient drone goes directly for something breathtaking and uncontainable without getting too explosive. In fact, despite the shrill synths closing the song, the bass synth rumbles feel on the verge of a volcano burst—it only ever implodes. While “Dangerous Boys” is no less mysterious in tone, the gamelan and synth keep the song from sounding dark. At best, it puts you in a strange and inexplicable atmosphere. “Harm’s Way” then opens with an electric piano and smooth saxophone duet, almost like a musical entrance into “the unknown.” If you will, this part of Road Closures is where the adventure into the nothing truly starts taking shape—or if you are divorced from an album’s concept, four minutes of stoic melancholia. The saxophone adds a distant and lonely feel over psychedelic washes of saw synths and contemplative electric piano. Such melancholia only heightens with the lo-fi etude, “Harmonium Glitch.” Think if Boards of Canada distorted a reed organ to go with the desolation and paranoia themes.
Thankfully, the melancholia does give way to a more uplifting release. After the jazzy and galactic synth brass of “Moon,” “Biting Nail” wafts in the wave of an imagined universe, but the song, this time, provides more comfort within the present. No heightened keys, no skittering field recordings, just distant, reverbed synth pads, and synth strings under thumps of guitar and bass. Completing what happens to be the comedown period of the album, “Voices” leaves the listener free of any real resolve. Between blinking keys and distant moans of Fitzpatrick’s vocals, it is a mere return to the distant land from which the unknown was born.
Road Closures is the soundtrack to whatever your mind brings to it—a picture of an empty planet or a deep emotional dive into an uncertain time. Just know that such an album is one of the most immersive, world-building albums you will hear all year.
