by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
When the most personal of experiences and reflections feel as though they’re just heavy enough to be overwhelming, sometimes it’s best shared with great friends. That sentiment runs rampant throughout Sour Widows’ self-titled debut. The Oakland quartet lean on each other for support, figuratively, but also quite literally, their songs dependent on interlocking guitars and ever present vocal harmonies. Singular depression, adoration, and frustration becomes collective, their burden easier to bare. The EP, which really feels a lot more like a full length these days, is immaculately constructed, as sure footed a debut as they come, the product of patient songwriting and collaborative strength. While the band wear the “bedroom rock” tag, their music rises far beyond the idea of lo-fi home tinkering, each song an example of dynamics at work, both gentle and mountainous, with structures rarely repeating.
At first glance you could consider Sour Widows to be on the easier, laid back, end of the spectrum, with elements of twangy folk and singer/songwriter grace. The further you dig however, Sour Widows is a heavy album, both mentally and musically, the noise of their anxieties only perpetuated by the beauty it unfolds from. All ease is fleeting and moments of calm are usually shattered, but the band are never tipping off the rails. Sour Widows have placed these moments of crushing clean-toned catharsis into the tapestry, the outbursts natural and organic, the result of life’s bumpy roads. While the loud-quiet-loud dynamic isn’t anything new, there’s something special about way that Sour Widows embrace it. Their emphatic shifts in tonality are used beyond breaking up verse and chorus, interjected just when things become saccharine, shaking the shit out of a sense of familiarity. Inspired by bands and artists like Big Thief, Pile, Angel Olsen, and Palehound, it’s clear that Sour Widows are quick learners, but their influences are merely guiding principles that they’ve reshaped and formed into their own.
It’s with this framework that Sour Widows unwind over a brilliant and visceral twenty eight minutes on a record that we’re deeply enamored with. From the opening moments of “Tommy” and its wavy twin guitar introduction, the duo of Maia Sinaiko (guitar, vocals) and Susanna Thomson (guitar, vocals) become fused together, impossible to imagine one without the other. Their guitars snake around each other, shimmering with finger picked nuances and hollowed resonance, but it’s their vocals that do much of the heavy lifting, synched together yet unique enough in tonality to dazzle singularly. The song feels like a reflection of love lost, and the remaining sting that comes even as distance sets in, with inescapable reminders that have them waiting for the skies to open wide and “eat me alive.” While they wind their way into an all too brief refrain (something the band truly excel at) wishing for “just a moment alone in the sunshine,” the clouds darken and the tension sets in, explodes, and fades, in rapid succession. It’s structural figures like that create earworms in every corner, and its something they do to incredible effect.
Playing with a weary sense of depression on “Whole Lotta Nothing,” an ode to “doing jack shit,” Sour Widows build upon a slow moseying hook and their heart-wrenching words, “today is a joke, I want to put my eyes out”. Boredom, however, seems to only be the surface. The song works a seasick guitar harmony that sways back and forth, trickling between the swoon of mounting tension and the eventual release that feels akin to a tidal wave breaking. “Pilot Light” takes the record’s most immediate path, swaying and shaking with harmonies so radiant each line ends with its own hook. By the time the band slide into the song’s chorus, everything feels impossibly enormous, chasing it’s own dynamic range and pulling the floor out from beneath the mix only to jerk and devolve in unpredictable ways as it unfolds.
Then there’s album highlight “Open Wide,” a song that touches upon perfection in a similar way as Big Thief’s “Not”. From the woodsy twang to the inescapable harmonies rallying against the darkness of personal struggle, Sinaiko and Thomson work together to create something both beautiful and discordant, each chord ringing against each other with its own space to impact and fade, chords pulled tight to arpeggiated notes. As the inner battle of the lyrics takes a mental hold, the song follows suite, working into the explosive anti-hook of “there’s no excuse,” a visceral moment of repetition that only marks a break in the song, carefully executed but nowhere near the crescendo. Sour Widows take a roller coaster approach from there, dipping into the song’s actual refrain before flipping the tempo into another beautifully rendered mantra, “my body wants to let every fucking word fly,” delivered over knotted progressions and backwoods charm.
These songs and their gradual shove are never stagnant, never contrived, never forced. Every progression is essential, the movement before it created to serve the next. There’s a raw intensity to it and yet everything sounds utterly gorgeous. Aggressive peaks and depressive depths are made to shimmer without pop sheen, but by collective force and a singular vision. Sour Widows is the type of debut we’ll forever reference as an example of arriving fully developed and nuanced far beyond their years as a band.