Share on Bluesky
Share on X
The whole mess of Water From Your Eyes’ new album shouldn’t work, but it’s a car crash where everyone walks away from not just alive but feeling elated.
All things change.
A duo until recently, Nate Amos and Rachel Brown piloted Water From Your Eyes through a devoutly experimental early phase to the point of 2023’s breakout Everyone’s Crushed.
Playing their art rock to bigger audiences in support of fellow New Yorkers Interpol then added a fresh perspective, and guitarist Al Nardo and drummer Bailey Wollowitz from Fantasy Of A Broken Heart subsequently joined the group’s live line-up.
Conceptually, It’s A Beautiful Place, Amos says, is rooted in existential thinking: “It ended up being about time, dinosaurs and space…we wanted to present a wide range of styles in a way that acknowledges everything’s just a tiny blip.”
In keeping with the theme, the whirling instrumental opener One Small Step serves as a portal to this otherworld before the pair segue into the first of numerous captivating diversions.
Life Signs opens by cranking up some hardcore punk rifforama before then left turning into a fluently vulnerable chorus; think Stereolab gone a little Bikini Kill and you’re halfway there.
Whilst It’s a Beautiful Place’s sub thirty-five-minute duration means we’re not talking vast in terms of scale, this doesn’t mean that there’s a lack of ambition.
Located midway through the running order, the wordless cinematic You Don’t Believe in God? finds Water From Your Eyes crafting soundscapes in the name of re-engaging with theology, the exposition simply that, “Part of this record is about slowly becoming scared of god again after completely rejecting religion.”
Another opposite and equal part is in ensuring convention appears some other group’s rear view mirror.
There are two other music-only pieces, the first of which is It’s a Beautiful Place’s title-track’s bluesy jam, whilst the closer For Mankind simply completes the opener’s tape loop moonshot aesthetic.
There’s no need for lovers of structure to despair though. When they find it, it sticks, like on Born 2’s strutting nineties’ alt rock, or the envelopment of Spaceship’s freewheeling psychedelia.
In other words you probably didn’t expect to read about this particular record, the more adjacent to the orthodox things get, the more compelling the aesthetic becomes.
Here, Nights In Armor (a track salvaged from Amos’ solo project This Is Lorelei) rips along, while Blood On The Dollar’s corroded Americana wrangles blues rock into angsty, present day forms.
The standout though is Playing Classics. Lyrically impenetrable (“Look, face contoured, face the music, the crash/There’s a war on stage, smoke the glow into ash”), its thumping 4/4 chassis is framed with helter skelter piano, Brown’s vocoded alter ego in sardonic a duet with themself.
Characteristically out there, the whole mess shouldn’t work but it’s a car crash where everyone walks away from not just alive but feeling elated.
So, what’s all this about? Better let Amos tell his story: “A song can feel like everything, communicating vast emotional landscapes, but your favorite album is less important than any person.”
“That person is less interesting than any dinosaur. That dinosaur is less important than any mountain. That mountain is boring compared to any planet. That planet is only a part of a solar system. That solar system is microscopic next to any galaxy.”
“If music and all other human practices are meaningless on a cosmic scale, why does it still feel so important?”
All things change, and although Water From Your Eyes have seldom been capable of not jolting their listeners in the past, with In A Beautiful Place they’ve curbed these tendencies whilst still reinventing themselves times over again mid-record.
Your T Rex will love it.