The duo's twangy debut trades off between Dunphe and McDonnell's vocals, countering each other with passioned howls and concise songwriting that never overstays its welcome. "Walkin' Out" is a prime example, a cloudy western ballad that captures McDonnell's folk inflected blues and longing, desperately attempting to hold on to a relationship already in shambles.
Though Ray has lived here for 17 years, she’s not painting pretty pictures of the city; Door Girl depicts New York as a collage of horrors, anxieties, and frustrations, ranging from the personal to the grandly political. It’s a thesis statement for anyone living paycheck to paycheck (or less) in a storied American city overrun with garbage, gentrification, wage gaps, and public transit.
What Lotta Sea Lice does amount to is a charming and engaging record about friendship and making music. The narrative being constructed around this record, both in the media and in the lyrics themselves, is one of two artists not only genuinely appreciating the other, but also that of a friend helping to rescue another from uncertainty and expectation.
What can an album like Relatives in Descent offer during these dark times? Does it need to offer anything? Like us, it’s an album that is scared, confused, trying to make sense of senseless things. Relatives in Descent is an album concerned with it all. It’s an album that states what it knows and isn’t afraid to wade into what it doesn’t.
If their previous album revolved around a sense of loss and heartbreak, turns out the quartet are doing just fine... and they've never sounded better, go figure. Lead single "Benadryl" is a fantastic reintroduction to the quartet's art-rock glory, a song that blends power-pop and psych together in a gentle but just slightly off-kilter way.
While the band features Lubec's own Eddie Charlton (bass/vocals) and Matt Dressen (guitar/vocals), Wet Trident takes a decidedly more post-hardcore approach to their sound, orbiting in a world closer to late 90's bands like Recover, At The Drive-In, and a dash of Polvo for good measure. The trio's sound is dense and flailing, free of restraint and full of emotive energy.
