Popcorn Noises

Widowspeak - Widowspeak

Let’s confront the obvious part first: Molly Hamilton, of the new Brooklyn trio Widowspeak, has a voice with a lot of the same qualities as Hope Sandoval’s. She sings in the lower part of her register with a hint of huskiness and can, at times, drag certain notes slightly out of tune for effect. When Sandoval does it, there’s a distinctly narcotic vibe and her band generally plays loose and slow to accentuate it. The best Mazzy Star songs sound like they’re fading (ahem) in and out of consciousness. That’s not what Widowspeak do.

Widowspeak make tight, deliberate, carefully-considered songs. You won’t find tambourines and guitars languishing behind the beat here. In fact, you won’t find any detail that seems off-the-cuff or dedicated to atmosphere above development. This band has a gift for crafting lean, focused, and engaging arrangements. The guitar leads aren’t anything flashy, but they give equal attention to hook (“Nightcrawlers,” “Half Awake”) and texture (“Limbs,” “Harsh Light”), using only dashes of reverb or sonic grime. The drums have an earthy weight to them, a strength of purpose that neither pummels nor grandstands. Notice how, on the chorus of “Nightcrawlers,” the little bits of double-time gallop nudge the song ever forward, making it one of the most fun laments (a useful new oxymoron?) on an album already brimming with them.

“You think you’re low, but you can get lower,” coos Hamilton on “Hard Times,” another standout track. It’s a rudimentary break-up song set in the gray months of late autumn, and even as she bemoans not only the pain but the utter banality of it all—“We met at the end of October / it’s the same thing over and over”—the simple sweetness of her “oooOOoo” and the liveliness of the band around her make it sound fresh. That’s another gift of Widowspeak’s: they can redeem their own shortness of poetic lyricism with the careful rise and fall of a hook. Take for example the way Hamilton blithely slurs together the syllabic repetitions of “Fir Coat” (“it would still feel fi-ai-ai-ai-ne”) or the coyness of the aforementioned “Nightcrawler”s ode to evenings out on the town, “We won’t remember what we do.”

I would argue that Widowspeak is less a work of nostalgia than simply a work with clear reference points that manage not to wholly define it. Like I said, for all the Hope Sandoval comparisons, listening to Widowspeak doesn’t really feel like listening to Mazzy Star, and the other touchstones one might pick out—50s and 60s pop/rock, mostly—don’t tend to hold up as legitimate points of nostalgia in an era of such rampant pop revivalism. There’s certainly a sense of longing in much of Hamilton’s delivery, a downtroddenness or sense of loss (“Harsh Realm” especially), but it doesn’t bear a clear connection to time and place. Some of that stems from the fact that this is a band that’s figured out the “how” before the “what,” but a lot of it is just because not all songs about sadness and loss have to contain homages to the specific past. Invoke the 90s if it helps you enjoy it, but I don’t hear this record painting the listener into some kind of corner where that’s the only way out. It’s an easy distinction to overlook, but it’s why I’m doubly glad Widowspeak are around to remind us.