Widowspeak

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 codependency. And old love gets worn in, soft as an old t-shirt.  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 record, but it’s also the most deeply realist: the stage is set not with dramatic overtures but the backdrop of the minutiae and repetition of daily acts.  Small observations before, during, and after work: the ritual of pouring water for customers, catching a cold on your day off.  Daydreaming about winning the lottery, or maybe realizing you already won.  Here, love is a way to talk about what drives us, and 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.  As the title track goes: Not all thorns will prick you, you still feel the first. And now you don’t grow roses because the one still hurts… I want to be the one. 

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 its songwriters, and they have honed their sound across sixteen years and an impressively consistent catalog. A lot has happened in that time: for them, for everyone.  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 (Glasslands, Cake Shop, 285 Kent, Death By Audio to name a few) and their practice space in Monster Island Basement (now a Trader Joe’s).  The highs and lows of a long career mean chaotic stints as road dogs traipsing across North America, fly-in gigs to São Paulo or Guadalajara, wrapping seven-week European tours… And then down-time of years in between, considering the power of slowly building a body of work. Widowspeak is now a married couple, working day jobs in their own off-season. Robert is a carpenter, Molly a waitress. 

Maybe time has given Widowspeak the ability to grow slowly;  “Roses” is unpruned and more beautiful for it; left a little wild as it stretches its new growth in all directions.  From the opening chords of “The Hook” you can hear how far they’ve come: the road is open, the sky clears. The band feels at ease, and taking their time.  They recorded the album last January at the Old Carpet Factory on the Greek island Hydra: a studio in an old house tucked into the village’s steep hills.  It’s quiet there in winter, when the tourists have all gone home. Longtime touring members Willy Muse, John Andrews, and Noah Bond serve here as the players.  “Roses” was then taken home and slowly, lightly tinkered with, before being deftly mixed by Alex Farrar at Drop of Sun Studios, and mastered by Greg Obis at Chicago Mastering.  

“Roses” is Widowspeak at its best, drawing on forever influences. There’s dream and power pop, a little Stones, maybe some Petty, open and languid ballads with the twang of a Lynchian roadhouse band… Perhaps you hear REM, Yo La Tengo or Cat Power. A little Neil Young in Hamilton’s references to working at the diner.  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. And as producer, Robert captures the ephemeral magic of a band finding a song in the studio: something that still bears traces of the directness of Molly’s voice memos and the dense guitar tapestries of the demos. The rough-hewn marks of the tools are still evident, the noise kept in.  

“Can’t hold too tight or I’ll have nothing, Like a candy melts in your hand.” As the album closer  “Hourglass” contemplates the fleeting nature of something, anything, it illustrates what is most true about Widowspeak.   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.