Water from Your Eyes exult in blasting through genre barriers to forge a bewildering and captivating persona. The Brooklyn-based outfit thrillingly contain multitudes; every song exudes acontagious vigor, and yet there is a studied intensity to their worldly music as well.
On Water from Your Eyes’ breakthrough, the critically lauded 2023 album,Everyone’s Crushed, vocalist Rachel Brown sings seemingly nonsensically about counting mountains. She does so in a way that feels deeply wise. Her deadpan voice somehow carries a profound presence far beyond their young years.Everyone’sCrushed‘s experimental bedroom-pop feels both intimate and vast.
Brown’s voice has a quality that draws you into its secretive sphere, and the song arrangements, courtesy of multi-instrumentalist Nate Amos, have a similarly familiar aspect, but also reveal a stunning musical maturity. That music can be both comfortingly cozy and cosmic was a revelation.Everyone’s Crushedwas out there in space somewhere, and yet completely anchored on Earth.
That tradition continues with the newest offering,It’s a Beautiful Place, from this genre-defying band.Sure, it’s become trendy to defy genres, but Water from Your Eyes really do it.The category-smashing onIt’s a Beautiful Placecould likely be attributed to several factors. However, given that Rachel Brown has been carrying around a copy of Ursula K. Le Guin’s celebratedThe Dispossessed, among other tomes, it appears that the anarchist author’s radical yet practical ideas about alternate-world building have been seeping into Brown’s psyche.
LeGuin was known for Taoism, too, and Water From Your Eyes’ music does mine the mystical, especially in the instrumental interludes (such as the trippy loop, “One Step”, the more meditative “You Don’t Believe in God”, and the psychedelic title track) that embellish the full-fledged songs on the album.
With the new album, Water From Your Eyes, the duo have been fleshed out into a foursome, adding members who help augment the sound to encompass elements of stoner metal, jazz, disco, funk, and more. A sonic stew of sorts, and yet it’s all so fluid as to dissolve almost any hint of influences. Everything feels thick and significant.
Brown’s voice often has a stoic tone. Still, their vocals can just as easily soar into ethereal territory, as seen on “Life Signs”, which veers toward hard rock before shifting into dream pop for the refrain, bolstering alternately foreboding and hopeful lyrical phrasing. “Lost my reverie / It’s locked up in a prison / Life signs / I am coming apart / I’m becoming together.”
The strummy, stompy “Nights in Armor” continues that duality: “Believe that the future is free / No fire, no world,” urges Brown in a mellow croon.“Born 2” is the song that Le Guin influences most explicitly. Brown’s soft singing is buried beneath a haze of shoegaze guitars, as she ruminates on the positive possibilities beyond our ruined world, and then at the end intones “psychopath”, alluding to our current political predicament.
“Playing Classics” is likely the closest we will get to a banger with Water From Your Eyes. However, true to form, it’s more of a cerebral banger than a club hit, and yet it does owe an obvious debt to the outsized influence of Charli XCX‘sBrat.The classic rock-adjacent “Blood on the Dollar” brings us down from the heights of clubland into the soil again, where we can muse on the reality of death matter-of-factly. We are then lulled into the concluding track, “Mankind”, which echoes the opening loop, framing the album as a cohesive package of controlled chaos.
Art rock can sometimes be preciously pretentious and esoterically alienating. Water from Your Eyes are neither. They draw you in with their vibrancy and dynamic revelry in the freedom of discovery. They make you notice their experimental edge, yet the final result is that they summon reverence for the musical forms that came before without sacrificing a startling individuality.
Whereas the previous offering left everyone crushed under the oppressive weight of late-stage capitalism,It’s a Beautiful Worldenvisions a more hopeful universe, in which, in the words of Rachel Brown, “So you dream / You build, you change / The cage looks like a window pane.”
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