Water From Your Eyes share their real world re-work.
Sometimes life comes at you pretty fast.
Speaking around the time of the release of their fifth album Everyone’s Crushed earlier this year, one half of Water From Your Eyes – Nate Amos – admitted that the change in pace and attention levels being afforded to the duo had required a rapid shift in their perspectives.
‘Everything’s gone from zero to 100’, he revealed, after almost a decade largely spent in a word-of-mouth hinterland, a period ended by their signing to the relatively prominent Matador label.
Amos and the band’s other member Rachel Brown originally met in Chicago before moving to New York and releasing their debut Long Days No Dreams in 2017. Perpetrating a brand of esoteric, hard to unravel art pop, they’ve in the past used their anonymity as a means of exploration (every track on 2018’s All A Dance was written from the perspective of film characters in non-existent projects) until their unlikely breakout and then subsequent exposure touring with label mates Interpol.
Rolling back a little, the augurs for Everyone’s Crushed weren’t exactly the stuff of honouring a new relationship; supposedly made from existing material and ripped off some arcane hardware which was about to expire, its roughness was, the band reckoned, of sandpaper grade. Again, it may be their playfulness or a creaky promotional myth, but their own legend has it that they never considered re-editing or adding finesse. New paymasters? What you hear is what you get, suits.
Be that either cavalier or expedient, it was however an approach that didn’t stop the critical chatterati losing their cool and throwing salute after salute. This was even more surprising given that most of the songs had been written during the pandemic’s colossal mind fuck, and Amos’ continuing struggle with substance abuse (he’s better now).
But on the wonk-ridden Barley, the title-track’s oddball, No Wave distortion and closer Buy My Product’s febrile post-punk there was a directness and newfound clarity to their presentation, if not exactly accessibility to go with it.
Everyone gets the idea of the remix album, but whilst they were once a popular thing, fewer artists engage with them, presumably because finding people who you’re willing to mess up your stuff in an agreeable way can be a difficult process. Crushed By Everyone is that thing though, but at least for those with OCD, the works are re-presented in the same running order as the original.
There’s a natural temptation given that to lay the things side-by-side, but results vary for all sorts of different reasons. There was never much to work with on the sub two-minute opener Structure, and here it’s darkened whilst the blistered, ethereal scuzz of Mandy Indiana’s take on Remember Not My Name dancefloors up the original.
The best part though is hearing how the album’s centrepieces turned out in this alien landscape. Here, 14 – originally a bright-light poem set to classicist tableau – is submerged by Jute Gyte’s minimalist, slashing tension, whilst the title-track’s ultra sparse funk becomes warped, hallucinogenic R&B and Buy My Product is transformed by fantasy of a broken heart into a demented sequence of public access TV jingles and cassette stolen soundtrack oddness.
Life comes at you, whether that’s what you need or not. Water From Your Eyes have slipped unannounced into the straight world, but Crushed By Everyone keeps one foot in more familiar places, zero to a hundred and back, strange episodes all at a speed of their choice.
