Widowspeak + Dead Gowns

An album called “Roses” would be concerned with romantic gestures. Across the ten tracks that make up the seventh and newest Widowspeak record, intimate spaces and stages of love are captured with a nostalgic, vaseline-coated lens. Candles burn inside red glass as lovers get close in a leather booth. Celebrity headshots gaze down like angels in a restaurant. Elsewhere, carnations are pressed in a blackbook and dancers pull each other close. Widowspeak is a band that riffs on big emotions without being too self-serious. The sweetness, even silliness, of an extended limerent phase becomes as all-consuming as a pulpy trade paperback. Cars and their drivers serve as a way to talk about codependency. And old love gets worn in, soft as an old t-shirt.

If music can simultaneously be naturalistic and noir, saturated and lush, that is Widowspeak. They’re a band that knows how to set a scene. These songs use intimate moments to talk about deeper heartaches: the restlessness inherent in modern existence, waiting around for something to happen. Or, feeling at odds with playing a role in your own life. “Roses” might be the most romantic Widowspeak record, but it’s also the most deeply realist: the stage is set not with dramatic overtures but the backdrop of the minutiae and repetition of daily acts. Small observations before, during, and after work: the ritual of pouring water for customers, catching a cold on your day off. Daydreaming about winning the lottery, or maybe realizing you already won. Here, love is a way to talk about what drives us, and Widowspeak suggest it can be the whole point. The light that illuminates the dark corners of a day, a life. A reason to keep going despite the pain it can cause.

Widowspeak are one of the most prolific and hardworking bands going, bubbling just under the surface. Molly Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas are the core of the group and its songwriters, and they have honed their sound across sixteen years and an impressively consistent catalog. A lot has happened in that time: for them, for everyone. One of many bands to crop up in a fertile New York City music scene, they started out shuffling gear between venues now-since shuttered (Glasslands, Cake Shop, 285 Kent, Death By Audio to name a few) and their practice space in Monster Island Basement (now a Trader Joe’s). The highs and lows of a long career mean chaotic stints as road dogs traipsing across North America, fly-in gigs to São Paulo or Guadalajara, wrapping seven-week European tours... And then down-time of years in between, considering the power of slowly building a body of work. Widowspeak is now a married couple, working dayjobs in their own off-season. Robert is a carpenter, Molly a waitress.