All Yours

Description

Widowspeak have grown up in a lot of ways. The bands third album, All Yours, is one that could only come from Molly Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas: a honed and elegant interweaving of dream-pop and slowcore rock and roll, easygoing melodies and dusty, snaking guitars. Its also their finest release to date ten beautiful songs that are refreshingly straightforward yet built from the same well chosen and deftly used tools the band have always worked with.

All Yours is ambitious without feeling laboured, anchored in the strengths of Widowspeaks consistent influences. There are those familiar Morricone come Verlaine guitar passages, moody and country-tinged instrumentation, watery tremolo, velvety stacked vocals. You can hear Mollys affection for The Cranberries and The Sundays in the wavering melodies of Dead Love or Girls and Robs adoration of George Harrison and Robbie Robertson in his brilliantly economical guitar playing. The result is an aesthetically diverse and profoundly nostalgic sound; indebted to past eras without feeling dated.

After many line up changes, the band chose to work again with Jarvis Taveniere, who produced their self-titled debut in 201. They also enlisted him and drummer Aaron Neveu (both of whom play in Woods) as the studio rhythm section. The presence of Taveniere and Neveu contributes a groove that wasnt there previously among a few other new things: the swell of strings at critical moments and for the first time, voices beyond Mollys own. We finally get to hear Rob sing in the earnestly laidback Borrowed World.

Members of psych outfit Quilt contribute harmonies and keys throughout the record, most notably in My Babys Gonna Carry On and Cosmically Aligned.

Perhaps All Yours is so refreshing because its a return to form. Its a record that feels as effortlessly unplanned as their debut; that serves to capture a moment rather than create one.