by Tom Alexander (@___alexd)
It would be hard to top the year Rachel Brown and Nate Amos have had in 2019. As This Is Lorelei, Amos released two excellent full-length records on the same day (The Mall, The Country and The Dirt, The Dancing); as the band Thanks For Coming, Brown released an incredible 24 track album, No Problem, complete with music videos for each individual song (also featuring Amos on drums and production). Because both Brown and Amos overflow with creative energy, their collaborative project, Water From Your Eyes, is back with a new LP, Somebody Else’s Song. As a follow-up to their previous record – 2018’s All A Dance – the new record expands the breadth of the group’s sound by turning both inward and outward. It’s both more nuanced and more radical than their previous work, a deep breath in and a gasp.
An imperfectly perfect pop record (or perhaps it’s a perfectly imperfect one?), Somebody Else’s Song subverts your expectations by changing itself from song-to-song, while maintaining its own distinct cohesive identity. Take Side A of the album for example: a beautiful acoustic ballad (the title track), a 10-minute krautrock dance song (“Break”), and a misty indie-pop gem (“No Better Now”). The three songs have so little in common, it’d be easy to imagine that they were crafted by separate songwriters, each with their own unique perspectives and voices. Yet, it’s this willingness to throw a curveball that makes Somebody Else’s Song wonderfully cohesive: it’s like a fractured mirror, reflecting different slices of the same room. Each song is radically different from the last, but each song is a confident pop song.
Even as Somebody Else’s Song expands into other genres (e.g., folk, dance, rock, electronica, pop), it continues to reference itself. “Look,” an incredibly distorted and synthesized vocal melody is echoed in “Look Again,” a sparse acoustic skeleton of a song. The opening track, a folk-tinged ballad, is reprised as a muscular, dance-ready “Bad in the Sun.” This playfulness makes Somebody Else’s Song mesmerizing – these songs’ recurring motifs reinforce the way the album works as a fractured mirror. The lines may be the same, but their impact is wildly different. When Brown sings the lyrics of “Somebody Else’s Song,” it feels fresh and sorrowful; when those same lines reoccur in “Bad in the Sun,” it feels in some ways like a cleansing. The mammoth distorted bass blasts clearing away any of the naïveté of “Somebody Else’s Song.” By the time the listener makes it to the end of the song, they, like the narrator, are not the same. It’s a real Songs of Innocence / Songs of Experience for you William Blake stans out there.
The other two centerpieces of Somebody Else’s Song, “Break” and “Adeleine,” reveal the two driving forces of Water From Your Eyes. As the album’s first single, and as the song the band tends to open their live sets with, “Break” is as bold as you can get. With a discordant guitar line and no true chorus, this 10-minute, heavy, uncompromising track represents Water From Your Eyes at its most physical. It’s both avant-garde and strangely inviting, with Amos’ circular production and Brown’s vocals lulling the listener into an altered state of consciousness. “Adeleine,” on the other hand, comes across like a more straight-forward pop song, with its clear melody and strong, seemingly inevitable chord progression. It’s a song that feels instantly familiar, but like the subject of the song, is just slightly out-of-reach. Unlike “Break,” which quickly embraces you despite its unconventional approach, “Adeleine” seems to keep you at a comfortable distance.
The cover artwork of Somebody Else’s Song feels appropriate: a Goya piece that has been exploded with warm colors. Like the art, Water From Your Eyes is interested in creating new music by reinventing itself. In some ways, that’s literal – the way these songs have motifs that reappear, the way the songwriting relationship of Rachel Brown and Nate Amos has changed over the years – but in other ways, it’s bigger than that. Classic pop music has been transmuted into something fresh, bigger, and engaging on Somebody Else’s Song.