by Alex Hanse (@alexthechemist)
I saw a Tweet the other day collating a list of “genres that are not real.” I was mildly perturbed to see “art pop” ranked second on the list. With genre being inherently fluidic, I felt such tacit dismissal of a descriptor unwarranted, a genre that easily encompasses Bjӧrk, Madonna’s early output, and David Byrne’s entire discography. At first, the genre’s shifting musical elements emerged in the aftermath of the true advent of commercial popular music in the 20th century, then into intentionally abrasive modes with punk rock and its fellow anti-standard bearers of the early 70s “underground.” That “underground” sound was then softened through the synthesis of commercially-friendly earworms and indulgent flourishes of backing string sections or vocalists, into the even looser genre catch-all that is “post-punk.”
Perhaps the only real issue with labeling anything is the lack of scope a few words intended to communicate the idea of genre can effectively convey. Perhaps it’s more accurate for artists to describe their music in their own words, like the “sandwich rock” tag Nate Amos uses to describe Water From Your Eyes. One half of the duo with Rachel Brown, Amos takes on the instrumentation and production, while Brown is the Tin Pan Alley-esque poet whose keen wordsmithing distills the mounting contradictions and ennui of the struggles of life for the majority in this hyper-capitalist hellscape. The vocalist shifts between near-monotonous deadpan half-rap and their earnestly tender singing voice across their catalog, and continued here on their seventh official album of new material, It’s A Wonderful Place.
To describe the familiar-but-unique music Water From Your Eyes has excelled and continuously built upon since first coming together in Chicago almost a decade ago, I’ve settled on “collagist pop,” an assemblage of recognizable bits of the past 60 years of music made anew with unique elements, complex arrangements, and elemental shifts, emerging as a new, cohesive work of art. Water From Your Eyes popped onto my radar in 2019 when I first heard the warm summertime folk pop title track of Somebody Else’s Song, a looping fingerpicked acoustic melody that certainly would’ve made a splash in the post-Monterey pop soft rock golden era of the early 1970s. But if you expected the rest of the album to follow suit, you’d be as disappointed as you were surprisingly satisfied.
But that’s the point Water From Your Eyes has always been trying to make—you can craft pop music that sounds like pop music, yet defies convention and expectation. It’s A Beautiful Place opens with a few bars of airy, wobbly synth and sparse dub on the sub-30 second “One Small Step,” the title of which evokes what might’ve been the result if the Apollo Eleven tried to describe what it felt like to land on the moon to Wendy Carlos using only a marimba. You’ve landed on Water From Your Eyes’ planet and, surprise surprise, it’s just Earth, in all its rapturous beauty and ceaseless horrors. A peal of electric guitar introduces the dueling chug of stacked guitars on “Life Signs,” the album’s lead single and a succinct thesis statement Brown spits immediately before the chorus: “I’m unfulfilled, I’m in a beautiful place / Yeah it’s so sad in this beautiful place / I need you here right now in this beautiful place”.
I’ve found myself rapping along to these lines while driving to work in the hot, unsettling haze of wildfire smoke of these past few weeks, thinking I would be interested in listening to what Brown might do if they started a rap side project. I’ll leave it to them if that would work through their solo moniker thanks for coming, because right now Brown and Amos are more than content to push the envelope on their brand of guitar-driven experimental pop. Echoes of what I can only describe as a clown nose honk pitched up through a delay pedal open the jangly ripper “Nights In Armor,” the lead guitar muscling its way to the front with a crunchy riff that trades places back and forth with bass guitar across the track. Brown’s relatable melancholy seems to break loose into the confused frustration of someone stretched to their limit, explaining at the onset that “I just wanna fight you cuz I’m tired” before seemingly egging it on two minutes later, saying to “Fight me I burn brighter,” suggesting they feed on the energy of the confrontation, before being consumed by it or maybe looking for the next challenger to fall before them. The song ends with the repeated and autotune-reflected refrain “Fight me I’m on fire” against a staccato machine gun-like hi hat that’s filled out with static crashes, creating an enrapturing effect you can’t help but dance along to.
And that’s the other side of the coin Water From Your Eyes keeps flipping; that pop music is something you should be able to dance to as much as it is a vehicle for abstraction. It’s no surprise then that they’ve repeatedly mentioned taking inspiration from Mark Rothko, the landmark modernist painter who attracts as much ire for the simplicity of his mid and late period work as he does deep reverence for what that work embodies and inspires in the viewer. Standout track “Born 2” might be my favorite on the album and one of their best songs yet. Opening with a one second cello note before programmed drums introduce a jagged growl of guitars and distorted violin, Brown harps on a slant refrain, saying how where we’re born to behold the commonness of the word but born to become something else, born in a world that’s a beautiful paradise and we belong to it, but post-industrialization means we’re born into a world of machines and the artifices they produce both in tangible consumer goods and the culture they inform. It's a meditation on the contradictions that mount to create the image of endless consumption in a world of finite resources that, now with the LLMs tech companies are desperate to refer to and accept as “Artificial Intelligence,” are literally reflected back onto us as mirages of our appearance and language, unreally tinged yellow in an ever-deepening uncanny valley. It’s enough to drive anyone crazy, and the repeated references to psychopaths could be tech bro CEOs as much as they could be their AI-psychosis victims. We are trapped, answering a question Brown answers themselves at the end of the track, and it’s killing me too.
Songs like “Born 2” and their most “Water From Your Eyes”-sounding song yet, the B-side opener “Spaceship,” make me wonder how Brown separates their lyrically-minded poeticism from what I read in their written work. Over a cacophony of stitched together sounds, a square wave-modulated squeal of guitar, a litany of drum presets in conversation with and over themselves, an up-and-down bassline that collapses into a lovely string refrain that’s subsequently added alongside everything else before the tempo switches up, impossibly fast drum fills and ripped electric guitar strumming taking their place, what grounds the whole experience is a tender and straightforward lament on heartbreak and suicidal ideation, the struggle to regain ground within one’s self after a life-altering event, and the hindsight that comes with surviving in spite of it all. Its imagery and emotion are so succinct yet invite worlds of relatable experience and sensations we all embody, and it’s gorgeous.
The public image Amos and Brown maintain as unaffected, effortlessly cool; blasé “whatever, man” background characters in a turn-of-this-century stoner flick (remember those? Legalization does have its downsides!) What their image fails to convey is that these two musicians are truly experts in their craft. No Water From Your Eyes album is complete without the seemingly random interludes and sonic experiments a new listener might at first find puzzling but which in part Amos inserts to provide narrative alongside Brown’s lyrics. The 50-second title track “It’s A Beautiful Place” finds Amos dueling guitars with himself, staticky solo noodling over a folk rock melody that stands on its own but serves to introduce the straightforward country rock stepper “Blood On The Dollar,” the last real “song” on the album. This is the song that they need to show Neil Young to prove their prowess to be trusted with an interpolation of “Cinnamon Girl,” and is one I’m sure was inspired from—and may be covered by—tourmates MJ Lenderman and the Wind.
Other melodious experiments crop up in “You Don’t Believe In God?,” where three primary electronic progressions make me at least ponder when Amos might take a stab at penning some contemporary classical. Is the New York Philharmonic free? This melody would sound beautiful reproduced by scores of string instruments, with the New York Choral Society holding down the soaring arias peeking out across the track. I’ve revisited this song countless times now to plumb its depths and I’m left wanting more.
Which is how It’s A Beautiful Place closes, looping back into how it all began with “For Mankind.” The song title is in conversation with how the album opener puts a cheeky spin on what is now one of the most famous phrases in the English language, and does nothing more but continue those introductory looping synths for another minute, as if it’s trying to say: “you want more?” Give it another whirl and see what sticks this time. Though barely hitting thirty minutes, It’s A Beautiful Place goes so many places and explores so many ideas so succinctly, that it’s almost a shock when it’s over. Maybe art pop is a fake genre, and collagist pop is too academic, but however you want to characterize it, It’s A Beautiful Place is their sharpest collection of songs yet.