Kathryn Mohr : Waiting Room

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Kathryn Mohr Waiting Room review

Iceland is an easy place in which to isolate yourself. It’s one of the most sparsely populated locales in the world, an island formed by volcanic rock where puffins outnumber people 20 to 1. That’s part of the appeal—most of it is untouched by industry or capital and left unspoiled, pristine. But it can be just as disorienting as it is awe-inspiring, situated so far north that its winters are nearly uninterrupted darkness and its sun never fully setting during the summertime. The memory of being there in June and stumbling out into the living room of my rental cabin after waking up in the middle of the night to see the landscape outside having never gone dark remains one of the most confusing and surreal in my lifetime.

That stark and beautifully bewildering feeling of unending twilight permeates Kathryn Mohr‘s debut full-length LP and second release for The Flenser, Waiting Room. Written and recorded in a room in a fish-packaging factory-turned-artist-space in the remote, eastern Icelandic village of Stöðvarfjörður, Waiting Room is both distant and affecting, evoking emotions that you can’t always put a name to. Mohr builds a surrealistic dreamspace as much as she writes songs, as if they were hallucinations made flesh within the detachment of solitude.

The entirety of Waiting Room comprises just Mohr performing solo, mostly on guitar and occasionally on piano, augmented by field recordings collected while in Iceland. Yet they feel complete even at their most skeletal. The album opens with “Diver,” a barely there wisp of simple, acoustic strums vibrating with low fidelity static. Mohr repeats a simple refrain throughout the song—”Discomfort is bad for you/But what can we do/When it comes to you“—like clipped fragments of a thought separated from a whole that’s just out of focus.

Mohr builds up from there, crafting richer and denser pieces even when the sum of their parts remains similarly bare bones. There’s a stark urgency to “Take It” that evokes some of the stripped-down moments on Liz Phair’s Exile In Guyville, with Mohr stitching together a dark series of images that feel powerful even without a clear narrative: “Creeping out of bed in the middle of the night, fear of missing everything/All the kids are on fire, they’re seeing everything.” “Elevator” is the loudest song of the lot and slathered in fuzz, inspired by the dystopian horrors literally being fed to us by video algorithms, in this case specifically someone who lost their arm in an elevator accident (“And now my limb starts to bleed/I lose my arm at the sleeve“). And “Horizonless,” with its downtuned riffs and Mohr’s barely intelligible but stunning vocals, leaves its impact as seemingly the heaviest piece of music here.

Waiting Room diverts from conventional songwriting altogether seemingly as often as Mohr crafts songs that are breathtaking in their simplicity, following similar musical threads that melt into sound collages that set the listener off balance in fascinating and stunning ways. “Driven” is a companion piece to opener “Diver,” revisiting its chord progression but with backward vocals and a dreamier surrealism. And while “Rated” juxtaposes distorted spoken-word lyrics with eerie organ drones and prickly field recordings, Mohr sets a phone company wrong-number message against metallic drones in “Cornered,” as if to reinforce the idea of isolation whereas much of the album just suggests it. In quiet seclusion, Waiting Room can be a rewarding companion, but the sense of wonder and comfort it provides just as often turn to a beautiful kind of madness.


Label: Flenser

Year: 2025


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