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Who: Kira Clark (vocals, guitar), Keith McGraw (drums, samples).
Sounds like: A funeral procession through ice and mud that long ago lost the path to the burial site but continues to trudge on ad infinitum.
For fans of: Chelsea Wolfe, Swans, Diamanda Galas, Virginia Woolf, doom metal that emphasizes âdoomâ over âmetal.â
Why you care: "Harrowing" is perhaps the best adjective to describe Muscle and Marrow's minimalist dirges—other options include "anguished," "bleak" and "terrifyingly beautiful"—which is why it's totally understandable that Kira Clark and Keith McGraw would feel the need to fib a bit about how they came together.
"We met on OkCupid but say it was in a bookstore," Clark confesses. "In my head it's Mother Foucault's, and we were wandering around looking for books on French ethical philosophy.â
Well, now that the secret's out, let the record show that Clark and McGraw are not morose goths who slump in a corner reading Aleister Crowley at house parties, even if Clark, wearing all-black everything with hair dyed silvery grey, fits the physical description. In person, they're downright bubbly. But that doesn't mean the darkness in their music is just theater. "I'm from Oklahoma, which is a restrictive place to grow up," Clark says. "There's not a whole lot of options for who you can be there. There was always this angsty feeling of otherness in me." A singer long before she tried writing songs, she began playing guitar after moving to Portland from Austin, processing a bad breakup alone in her room, before meeting McGraw, a Beaverton-raised musician also familiar with the pangs of self-suppression. "I've spent a lot my life hiding parts of myself," he says.
Muscle and Marrow became a source of cathartic release for both of them. The lurching repetition has earned many comparisons to Swans, while the tone of heavy gloom has endeared them to the metal crowd. Clark's chilling soprano is reminiscent of Diamanda Galas, though she credits Fiona Apple for giving her "permission to not be pretty all the time." (She says she's working to develop a higher, more blood-curdling shriek, inspired by the female mourners of ancient Greece.) The Human Cry, the duo's debut album, is intensely sorrowful. But the band insists it's not wallowing in misery—it's searching for a way to cope. "I've had a lot of family tragedies happen," Clark says. "Loss and death are unbearable. How do we deal with being alive, and being aware that the people we love are going to die?"
SEE IT: Muscle and Marrow play the Know, 2026 NE Alberta St., with Hail and VHMNT, on Friday, Sept. 26. 8 pm. Call venue for ticket information. 21+.
WWeek 2015