Widowspeak - Roses [LP]

An album called "Roses" would be concerned with romantic gestures. Across the ten tracks that make up the seventh and newest Widowspeak record, intimate spaces and stages of love are captured with a nostalgic, vaseline-coated lens. Candles burn inside red glass as lovers get close in a leather booth. Celebrity headshots gaze down like angels in a restaurant. Elsewhere, carnations are pressed in a black book and dancers pull each other close. Widowspeak is a band that riffs on big emotions without being too self-serious. The sweetness, even silliness, of an extended limerent phase that becomes as all-consuming as a pulpy trade paperback. Cars and their drivers serve as a way to talk about odependency. If music can simultaneously be naturalistic and noir, saturated and lush, that is Widowspeak. They're a band that knows how to set a scene. These songs use intimate moments to talk about deeper heartaches: the restlessness inherent in modern existence, waiting around for something to happen. Or, feeling at odds with playing a role in your own life. "Roses" might be the most romantic Widowspeak suggest it can be the whole point. The light that illuminates the dark corners of a day, a life. A reason to keep going despite the pain it can cause. Widowspeak are one of the most prolific and hardworking bands going, bubbling just under the surface. Molly Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas are the core of the group and it's songwriters, and they have honed their sound across sixteen years and an i'm-pressively consistent catalog. One of many bands to crop up in a fertile New York City music scene, they started out shuffling gear between venues now-since shuttered and their practice space in Monster Island Basement. Widowspeak is now a married couple, working day jobs in their own off-season. Robert is a carpenter, Molly a waitress. "Roses" is Widowspeak at it's best, drawing on forever influences. The magic of the band is, still and always, the interplay between Molly and Robert in their two leading roles: her languid, textured voice and his visceral guitar playing. At the heart of it, their music is special because it is real: most of all for the people making it. Fragile and temporary, and worthwhile... like love itself.