Album of the Month Water From Your Eyes — Everyone’s Crushed

On their new album, Chicago’s Water From Your Eyes dare to su est experimental music can be funny. Everyone's Crushed is littered with oblique lyrics delivered with the dead-eyed sarcasm of a mumblecore comedy, while dirty guitars and brutalist sonic farts rip through your speakers. It’s thrilling to hear songs gussied up in the signifiers of ‘challenging music’ be so completely unserious.

Take 14, an example of Rachel Brown and Nate Amos’s downright trollish collaboration. Neoclassical plucked strings and ambient drone swell, while Brown’s voice is at its most classically beautiful. Their words though are a punchline: ‘I’m ready to throw you up’. On Barley, a pop song put through an industrial mixer, they ad-lib ‘shit’ in such a deadpan way you imagine they must need gaffer tape to stop their eyeballs from spinning like they’re in a slot machine.

On Out There, over thrumming bass and Balearic keys, Brown tosses around a jumble of vocabulary, like a child slicing up newspapers to paste and stick. ‘Track free mend three bend feed knee hands scram mud draft drag…’ they go on, creating their own monosyllabic rhythm. It’s an encapsulation of the album’s diffuse musical approach, as different elements corrugate into something new.

It’s pleasingly hard to decipher if the band are at any point saying anything with any sincerity. When Brown drops the title phrase ‘Everyone’s crushed’, you’re certain nobody is. But then, on the same song, through repetition of surrealist language, a sense of profundity appears: ‘I’m with everyone I love and everything hurts / I’m in love with everyone and everything hurts / I’m with everyone I hurt and everything’s love / Loving everyone I’m with and everything hurts / Everybody is in love and every hurt gives / And with everything to love so everything goes’.

It happens on the final track too. But this time, Brown pulls the rug again just when you thought they were getting too introspective: ‘There are no happy endings, there are only things that happen… buy my product’.

The panoply of wrongfooting sounds continues: Open’s high frequency riffs hit like a migraine, and the denuded guitar of True Life asks: what if the production from Gwen Stefani’s What You Waiting For? was bent completely out of tune, stripped for parts, and anything remotely pleasant tossed away as junk? The duo says it’s all borne from unease. Their prescription is fuckery. [Tony

Westerman An Inbuilt Fault Partisan Records / Play

It Again Sam, 5 May rrrrr

Listen to: CSI: Petralona, Pilot Was a Dancer

Westerman’s second album is a reflection of fraught times.

Where Your Hero Is Not Dead and early singles embellished soft-rock’s melodic sheen to coat his feathery voice, An Inbuilt Fault has sharper edges. The cracked percussion and drone of opener Give hint at this, but the album’s themes reinforce the point. Idol; RE-run is more melodious but deals with the Capitol riots while I, Catallus. meditates on toxic masculinity and A Lens Turning is trapped in a loop of existential crises.

Pilot Was a Dancer sounds like The Verve with a more endearing singer but is concerned with a vague, dystopian future.

However, for the casual listener who fell in love with Westerman’s smooth, easygoing vibes on excellent songs like Confirmation, there are still plenty of lovely moments. CSI: Petralona is simpler and more personal, while Help Didn’t Help At All and I, Catallus. delve into yachtrock funk without falling foul of that genre’s schmaltz. An Inbuilt Fault is a natural progression in Westerman’s young career – a little more austere and timidly experimental. Like a similarly quiet revolutionary Amen Dunes, Westerman is carving out his own identity beyond his influences.

[Lewis Wade]

Cloth Secret Measure Rock Action, 5 May rrrrr

Listen to: Pigeon, Money Plant

Cloth have embraced new approaches in the creation of their anticipated second record. Formed of duo Rachael and Paul Swinton, changing their recording style and working with new faces brings a braver sense of musical direction to Secret Measure than their first LP. It never strays too far from the band’s distinctly understated sound – consequently some of the tracks feel a little samey. However, much like Cloth themselves, it’s within the subtleties of this record where the stand out features lie.

Rachael’s hushed, almost whispered vocals are enveloping; like gentle clouds of sea mist settling onto the shoreline. The lyrics may have all been written by Paul, but they’re undoubtedly imbued with Rachael’s own experiences through her delicate delivery. Tracks like Pigeon show the band at their most refined yet, brimming with dynamic arrangements. Never Know correlates by leaning into poppy tendencies. But it’s within the album’s varying textures where Cloth’s boldness shines. Neat layers of guitars, synthesisers and molecularlike rhythms intertwine in sync with one another, each a joy to unravel. A meditative body of work specked with spots of boldness, Secret Measure weaves new colours into Cloth’s musical fabric. [Jamie Wilde]

Lucy Liyou Dog Dreams (개꿈) American Dreams, 12 May rrrrr

Listen to: Dog Dreams (개꿈), April In Paris (봄), Fold The Horse (종이 접기)

The three tracks across Dog Dreams (개꿈) share a lot of the building blocks of the current wave of collaged ambient; the glistening synths, the field recordings, the delicate piano, but Liyou manages to invest a real feeling into them that allows it to surpass their contemporaries. The patient opening to the title track seems to accumulate various detritus, slight hiccups of found sound and loose electronics until it careens skywards with gorgeous organ. Fold The Horse (종이접기) on the other hand closes in a heavenly whirlwind of wordless vocals, flickering field recordings and chiming synth chords. Forgoing the text-to-speech that peppered their earlier work, Liyou foregrounds their own voice, erupting out of the songs at various junctures of high emotion. It’s a bracing tool, all bass rumbles and sparks of noise under quivering vocals. It works spectacularly well, particularly the plaintive wails at the end of the title track that give a tension to the record so many others around lack. It’s another strong record from Liyou, that sees them further experiment and push at their own boundaries, unveiling an ever more interesting artist with every release. [Joe Creely]

SBTRKT The Rat Road AWAL, 5 May rrrrr

Listen to: Demons, L.F.O.

SBTRKT’s now-iconic mask started as a way to put all focus on the music. With that anonymity, electronic producer Aaron Jerome could avoid any preconceptions people might have when looking at him. But surrounded by a strong gang of collaborators in Little Dragon, Jessie Ware and Sampha, it also led to a kind of voicelessness.

Six years since his last record, he’s far away from needing the mask. The Rat Road is a wondrous and playful musical sketchbook that takes the SBTRKT sonic blueprint and builds something lasting. He’s used his time away to explore. The Rat Road is unrestrained. It plays like a classic beat tape, albeit with refined, expensive-sounding production. It’s soaked in nocturnal UK dance sounds, wistful piano and a deep emotional pull.

There are plenty of great guest contributions, like his longtime collaborator Sampha and fresh talents like George Riley, who both nail their vocal contributions on single L.F.O. But all of these guests are characters in a well-directed whole. The scrappy organ interlude Rain Crush and the eerie human horror story Coppa are just as important. In doing so, it reveals the voice that was always there.

[Skye Butchard]

Listen

Opening with the heavy sigh of Bruiseless – an expulsion of confusion around growing up – Arlo Parks simultaneously grieves the loss of the days when her ‘eyes were still wide’ and celebrates the bliss of true romance in her present life. Parks’ vocal tone is particularly clear and crisp across My Soft Machine, with her sharp S’s and C’s cutting through the laid-back lo-fi instrumental of Impurities like a hot knife through butter. The cool, cushiony bass of Devotion is also one to listen out for, laying down a spongy foundation for the crunchy Avril Lavigne-inspired guitars and catchy synth melody to dance upon in the final choruses.

There are no overt leaps or shifts in the development of Parks’ sound here, however there is something to be said of the unbridled confidence and general badassery she exudes on tracks like Weightless and Puppy. Parks also treats listeners to the undeniably beautiful Pegasus – a duet with queen of melancholy Phoebe Bridgers which serves up a delicate blend of their unique vocal identities. On My Soft Machine, introspective icon Arlo Parks practises an admirable gratitude for life in the face of some of its greatest challenges. [Jack Faulds]

Since forming in 2020, bar italia have released a steady stream of music. Throughout that time the group have ruthlessly preserved their anonymity; rarely granting interviews or sharing images of themselves online. However, that’s all about to change following the release of Tracey Denim, the band’s first release for Matador Records. The trio – composed of musician and artist Nina Cristante (aka NINA), Jezmi Tarik Fehmi and Sam Fenton – combine the rough naivety of C86-era indie music with washed-out grunge guitars and shoegaze buildups to create an album of hypnagogic pop songs.

From the ghostly mid-tempo beauty of tracks like Missus Morality and my kiss era, to lead single Nurse!, bar italia demonstrate how to be complex and seductive, without ever feeling pretentious. Key to this is their overlapping vocals which meld vulnerable and intimate harmonies with overdriven guitars and languid basslines to create a sound that seems to exist in a liminal space between waking and sleeping. The air of mystery that once surrounded the band might have evaporated, but with songs like these bar italia were never going to stay a secret for long. [Patrick

Gamble]

Eyes of Others

Eyes of Others

Heavenly

On Eyes of Others, John Bryden embraces his self-confessed “postpub-couldn’t-get-in-the-club” style. Like memories from a night out, it’s a fug of ticking drum machines, acid basslines, dub-style synth stabs and warped delay. Rarely raising his voice above a mutter, Bryden breathes a jumble of swithering inner-monologues, tongue-in-cheek motivational maxims and self-deprecating confessions into your ear.

The spirit of Ivor Cutler hovers over this album in its playfulness and deadpan humour, but that doesn’t account for its abundance of brilliant musical moments. Opening track Once, Twice, Thrice blooms into life with an outstanding slo-mo synth hook that you’ll be singing for weeks after; New Hair New Me is a perversely uplifting anthem about repressing joy – full of ukuleles, hand-claps and synth brass melodies; Jargon Jones & Jones comfortably sits in a sleazy digidub groove as Bryden complains about being too old to go out anymore.

This album has been a long time in the making and, while Bryden may insinuate he’s past it, this feels like the work of someone who has spent years whittling his music down to create a genuine and original personal expression.

[Jamie Pettinger]

Aperture is a captivatingly atmospheric debut from Hannah Jadagu. As indie, bedroom pop, and shoegaze entwine, her softly powerful vocals guide us as her lyrics span dreamy reverie to longing; love to liminality. “The blanket of synths I use throughout helps me move between sensibilities”, says Jadagu.

Listen to: Say It Now, Warning

Uncertainties and angst are not just things to get through, but worthy of exploration and feeling in and of themselves. Here, Jadagu’s diary-like lyricism melds with creative instrumentation and a markedly indie sensibility to do just so. Standout track Warning Sign sees alternating piano riffs, crunchy guitar and drum beats peek out through synth-saturated haze as she introspectively laments: ‘Every time I get this far it always falls apart / Shouldn’t even try my luck / Maybe it’s not enough’.

Bringing a contemporary and fresh flair to age-old universal themes of love, loss and longing, it’s easy to imagine any song on this album transposed onto the soundtrack of a coming-of-age film. Understated but never dreary, on Aperture Jadagu invites us into her inner world with refreshing vulnerability – to feel as she feels, dream as she dreams, and ultimately, to hold hope at the end of it all.

[Anita Bhadani]