Belief has been explored so often in music, it’s become a cliché: The artist searches for meaning in the cosmos, usually while grappling with the vestige of whatever faith he or she was raised in. The circumstances are different, but the conundrum is always the same: How do you translate the most intimate, infinity-grappling ponderings into songs that convey the micro and the macro of the matter, answers to questions that have eluded the wise, and enabled the ignorant, for millennia? On Believer, the debut full-length by Megafortress, sole member Bill Gillim successfully charts a different course. He foregoes conclusions altogether and reframes the big questions as abstract, almost mathematical contrivances. Then he threads his voice through them like a thief trying to pick a lock.
For all the album’s well chilled minimalism, Gillim’s voice is the most immediately striking thing about Believer. It’s virtuosic, in its own way; his lyrics are delivered in neat, easily graspable phrases and with piercing plainness, but the notes are pure. He’s not trying to confound or mystify, even though his range can plunge from heavenly falsetto to tormented moan. It doesn’t hurt that he gives his voice so much space. “Fear” is not only one of Believer’s most riveting songs, it’s the album’s fullest exploration of Gillim’s scope. Round, pulsing notes are coaxed from an upright bass while samples of saxophones split and reassemble around it. A piano skitters here; empty space yawns there. There’s a biomorphic falseness to the arrangement’s smooth, curved surfaces, but Gillim’s vocals breathe life into them. His lines are slow, drawn out, burdened with psychic weight. When he sings the word “fear” in an operatic register that would make Craig Wedren proud, it’s one of the most arresting single syllables anyone’s committed to record all year. “Fear has come undone,” he intones narcotically, and the absence of anything to replace it is just as terrifying.
Besides his voice, piano seems to be Gillim’s primary instrument. But where Perfume Genius’s Mike Hadreas and Grouper’s Liz Harris have made unique, majestic use of the keys-plus-voice equation this year, Gillim pulls back. He opts for tender clusters of chords, allowing his songs to be driven more by synth hums and hovering blocks of nothing. “Pilot” works field-recorded loops of seagulls into its gaping, throbbing, extended metaphor for angels; eventually they’re indistinguishable from helicopter blades. The instrumentals “Beginning” and “Bogota” feel incidental, treading the line between ambient and disposable. Mostly that’s because so many tracks on Believer seem as though they may be instrumental, up until Gillim’s celestial voice wanders in; if he’s trying to toy with expectations, it works at cross purposes to the record’s overall leap-of-faith prerequisite.