Description
Life is horribly dark right now. And yet, it is not unfunny.
Thats the sentiment that animates Water From Your Eyes on their new album, and first for Matador, Everyones Crushed, released May 26. On the follow-up to the Brooklyn duos 2021 breakthrough, Structure, Rachel Brown (they/them) and Nate Amos (he/him) find silliness and fatalism dancing in a frantic lockstep, using heart palpitating rhythms and absurdist, deadpan lyrics to convey stories of personal and societal unease. Described by Brown as Water From Your Eyes most collaborative record ever, its a swollen contusion of an album: experimental pop music thats pretty and violent, raw and indelible.
Everyones Crushed is shot through with unresolved tension, its nine tracks skittishly refusing to seek out resolute endings or stick to traditional structures. Many songs were written using serialism and microtonalism, and at times evoke the futurist-pop moves of Japanese composer Haruomi Hosono and the brutalism of Glenn Branca. Barley is a dance-rock track sequenced in alien tonality, with Brown speaking garbled transmissions (One two three/Counter/Youre a cool thing count mountains) over a bed of hallucinatory guitars. 14 leans into contemporary classical, with curtains of overlapping de-tuned strings underscoring lyrics that Nate describes as something out of a gross-out horror movie: Im ready to throw you up.
Water From Your Eyes still possess an off kilter, shitposty quality. Everyones Crushed manages to reference classic rock twice first, on Barley, when Brown accidentally invokes Sting with the lyric walk in fields of gold, and again on True Life, when they sing: Neil let me sing your song/Its been this way for so long/Give me another chance. Those werent the songs original lyrics Brown and Amos initially wanted to interpolate the bridge to Cinnamon Girl but this is a typically meta compromise for the pair, a way to turn True Life into a song about writing the song True Life.
Everyones Crushed maps the liminal space between humor and darkness, between cracking up and freaking out. In the albums closing moments Brown speaks in direct terms, Clap those hands/Buy my product/There are no happy endings/Im spending/Im spending. Its playful and totally serious, punky bordering on anarchic, and a resolution to the records opening sentiment I just wanted to pray for the rain/Wishful thinking for sunny days.
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