As they did on 2021’s concise but intricate Construction, Water From Your Eyes as soon as once more show that three excellent songs is all that one facet of an LP actually wants. “Nights in Armor”—written for Amos’ This Is Lorelei after which reworked—shuttles between glinting, Sarah Data-caliber indie pop, metal-adjacent chugging, and atonal skronk; half grunge and half shoegaze, “Born 2” traverses an Escherian staircase of fixing keys that summits repeatedly on a observe of fist-pumping triumph. Lyrically, it is likely to be essentially the most straightforwardly political factor that they’ve written, however the that means is as cryptic as ever. For all of the track’s promise of limitless risk (“Born to turn into/One thing else/One thing melts”), Brown repeatedly drives dwelling a single phrase—“psychopath”—like a silvery nail in a varnished coffin.
The second half repeats the format: three correct songs rounded out with two ambient sketches, however this time, one observe hogs the highlight: “Taking part in Classics,” a madcap dance-punk romp partially impressed by Charli XCX’s “Membership Classics.” Its ebullience is nearly awkward; its mismatching elements—disco hi-hats, Eurodance bass, too-bright keys, overdriven guitar solo, snatches of vocoder teased and simply as rapidly deserted—summed up within the file’s most utopian sentiment: “Apply shake it you’re free.” I think it is going to be the album’s large hit, definitely in a dwell context. I don’t prefer it as a lot as something on the A-side, however it’s, really, the album’s funniest track.
B-side opener “Spaceship,” although, is one other curler coaster of backmasked guitars and shifting time signatures, nearer in really feel to the A-side’s contorted alt-rock. It’s laborious to overstate how easy Water From Your Eyes make even essentially the most difficult grooves really feel, and Brown’s hopeful singing (“So that you dream, you construct, you modify/The cage seems like a window pane”) solely provides to the suggestion of weightlessness. The country-fried “Blood on the Greenback,” however, feels nearly like a demo, a bare-bones sketch for fuzzed-out guitar and muted drums. Slipping throughout slant rhymes and a sidelong Pixies reference, Brown is likely to be singing concerning the finish of empire, or the ennui of life on-line. The album’s lyrics by no means reveal something as clear-cut because the thematic speaking factors—house, dinosaurs, measuring human existence on a cosmic scale—the duo routinely trots out in interviews, however that’s a degree in favor of Brown’s suggestively mysterious writing. The duo’s banter could usually resemble low-stakes brainrot, however Brown’s writing reaches past stoned dorm-room riffing into locations the place the punchlines dissolve.
“It’s both nothing is essential or every thing is essential,” Brown lately advised Fader; in context, they had been speaking concerning the cosmic existentialism that informs It’s a Lovely Place, but it surely additionally seems like a good evaluation of Water From Your Eyes’ nearly obsessive consideration to element. One element particularly stands out on this charming, bold album: “For Mankind,” the ambient sketch that closes the file, is product of precisely the identical sounds because the intro, “One Small Step”—a queasy wash of what is likely to be a whirly tube run by way of digital processing, or maybe a household of chipper sea lions. When you hearken to the album on a loop, “For Mankind” will blur seamlessly again into “One Small Step,” successfully enclosing you inside Water From Your Eyes’ invented universe. A front-row seat for the Amos-Brown thoughts meld—sprawling, amorphous, airtight, overwhelming, heartbreaking, humorous as hell. It’s a privileged vantage level.
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