Showing posts with label shoegaze. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shoegaze. Show all posts
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Album Review: True Widow - Circumambulation


A  self-described "stonegaze" act from Dallas, TX, True Widow bear a stony gaze indeed on the cosmically dark collection of shadow songs that is their third album. Released on the heavy metal label Relapse, the record certainly feels boulder-heavy though its weight comes more from its sheer gloominess, its crunchy, steady assault, than from any traditionally metal qualities. Far from metal in texture, each track is carefully coated with psychedelic paint, albeit paint that comes only in colors ranging from gray to black.

 Alternating lead vocals between guitarist Dan Phillips and bassist Nicole Estill provides some variety on the uniformly bleak Circumambulation. Estill is particularly haunting on "Four Teeth," the lightness of her voice floating over the song's funereal thrust. The record is at its best, however, when Phillips and Estill combine forces. On "HW:R," the two nearly reach True Widow's approximation of pop, finding actual hooks within the clouded waters of their amplified swamp.

 As murky and dour as Circumambulation may be, it does achieve tonal perfection. The sound of the album is oppressive but evokes a definite emotional state. Whether casual listeners will choose to delve into this state, however, will depend on personal constitution. Circumambulation does not merely walk around the ears as its name suggests; it puts the clamp on them and turns the crank slowly.

Grade: B




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Album Review: Hookworms - Pearl Mystic



Hookworms' harrowing, fuzzbathed odyssey, Pearl Mystic, follows in the sludgy steps of Sonic Youth, echoing the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Flaming Lips at their most squealing and raw. The lo-fi record's stoned post-punk temperament may not be entirely user-friendly but it is frequently absorbing and not without wormy hooks. The crunchy chords and washed out vocals will estrange some even as they provide the mystic edge the LP's title alludes to. 

On lead single "In Our Time," Hookworms provide their most accessible bit of cosmic distortion. The Leeds-based drone act may tend to bask too much in their own artiness, but there is something mesmerizing about their experiments in decaying sound. The final flush of sonic warbling that screams down into nothingness at the end of "In Our Time" provides a devilish denouement to an otherwise loose, gently ominous, track.

Pearl Mystic is a spacey, star/shoegazer of an album. Still beauty bursts, great and terrible (and often terrifying) from beneath the centrifugal swirling. The band is more than promising, having already arrived at an effectively unsettling Fucked Up-meets-The Doors sound. Though genuine songwriting may occasionally get lost in a gray ocean of experimentation, Pearl Mystic provides an entrancing psychedelic experience that establishes itself immediately on the raucous opener "Away/Towards" and alternately moves away and towards brilliance over the course of its fairly short, steely running time.

Grade: B



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