Tropic of Cancer: Stop Suffering EP

Grief is a watery emotion, prone to slopping over the side of any container it occupies—and so it takes a project like Camella Lobo’s L.A.-based Tropic of Cancer, music that moves fluidly, to truly capture it. Stop Suffering, which Lobo recorded and self-produced with mixing and mastering from Joshua Eustis (ex-Telefon Tel Aviv), is her first major work since 2013’s glimmering Restless Idylls LP, and though it only comprises three tracks, the tracks are so finely crafted that it's a work worth returning to, playing again and again, and exploring within. It is a work about grief, yes, but a work wholly without self-pity, a work that urges slowly forward. It is a work about how grief ebbs eventually, with attention and time.

Lobo is an expert in how nearly microscopic musical changes can have an enormous emotional effect, and the opening title track is a master class on this phenomenon. It's built on gauzy layers of synth-wash just a step or a half-step away from one another, and as Lobo introduces a layer or pulls one back the subtle movement causes the whole track to shiver, like a spider’s web trembling below the movement of tiny feet. Her timing has to be impeccable to achieve this, and it is. Her vocal melody also stays within a relatively small range for most of the song, functioning more as an additional instrumental/ambient layer—pushed back in the mix, hovering suspended in delay—than a traditional vocal line winding around and through the instrumentation. It is a dense song with a dark heart that only truly shows itself near the end of the track, but it never feels murky.

"I Woke Up and the Storm Was Over" is more glacial in pace than the title track, but with a minimal heartbeat ticking at its core. It stretches luxuriously, like a cat's yawn, all choral synth and tidal sweep and percussive shoegaze bass, the sort that sounds like a big piano. On this one, Lobo’s vocals sit more atop the mix, more the focal point, more the driver. There is something in it that feels immensely, strangely hopeful.

If the title track is slowly running water and "I Woke Up and the Storm Was Over" is the glacier formed as that water starts to freeze, the closing track, "When the Dog Bites", is its iced-over final form. Droning and sparse in comparison to the highly textural tracks before it, "When the Dog Bites" throws Lobo’s voice into final heavy relief. When the bass drum hits, it feels like a communication across a vast expanse. The entire record feels composed in the way a classical piece does: a tale of grief in three movements, a tale of the sick motion of heartbreak eventually becoming still and distant, if not forgotten, as one's own sense of self becomes more pronounced. It is a delicate and painful journey, and one worth taking at Lobo’s side.