Brown’s voice, which in the past often seemed content to inhabit an area in roughly the same postal district as the tune, feels stronger. Some of the improvements are almost boringly prosaic, but crucial nevertheless. On Out There and Barley the effect is thrilling, as if everything is both teeming and on the verge of spinning completely out of control. It twists them until they sound off-key and disquieting rather than comfortingly familiar, marooning them over slippery rhythms and jutting them against rumbling live drums and bass, letting them spiral out of time. Notwithstanding all the cut-up, oddly bluesy guitar licks, its key sonic factor may be a warped approach to noises familiar from mid-80s pop – breathy, pan-pipe-esque electronic tones synths that sound a little like steel drums the kind of vocal samples that were the dernier cri in cutting-edge pop around 1985, thanks to the arrival of the Emulator synthesiser and the Art of Noise. But Everyone’s Crushed feels more straightforwardly poppy than either band. The most obvious comparison might be the swarming overload of Low’s most recent albums – notably when Open devolves into squealing, distorted guitar interrupted by digital noise – although occasionally you can trace the ghost of past generations of alt-rock: the detuned guitars and drones of 14 vaguely evoke Sonic Youth, as droning detuned guitars are wont to do. An experimental, idiosyncratic sound coalesced on 2021’s Structure, but it’s on Everyone’s Crushed that it pulls into focus, if that’s the right metaphor for a cut-up, sample-heavy sound that feels wilfully chaotic and scattered. There were concept albums and a collection of covers from which a dead-eyed version of Eminem’s Lose Yourself attracted attention. In ensuing years, they kept plugging away, audibly searching for an identity of their own. ![]() ![]() Their 2017 debut, Long Days No Dreams, covered so many modish US indie bases – bedroom synth-pop, offbeat post-punk and distorted digital noise, shoegazey textures, introverted acoustic balladry and what Americans persist in calling tweepop – it might as well have been called 6.9 From Pitchfork: fine if you like that sort of thing, but there really was more than enough of that sort of thing already available. The duo, Rachel Brown and Nate Amos, started out as nothing special. Which brings us to Brooklyn-based duo Water From Your Eyes.
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