Water From Your Eyes / Dazy

**WFYE**

There’s no perfect way to describe Water From Your Eyes; to relate the New York duo in absolutes would be imprecise and frivolous. Since 2016, the group's clear-eyed approach to dance music has combined austerity and satire, abrasion and charm, with the pair plotting sonic trajectories on All a Dance and forgoing traditional album structure with Somebody Else’s Song. Having begun as an anti-pop project à la New Order and LCD Soundsystems, Water From Your Eyes quickly found themselves pivoting into a style-shaking act, combining art pop, trance, and dance punk into a reflective fusion of influence and genre. Nate Amos (This is Lorelei) and Rachel Brown (Thanks for Coming) delight in contradiction on their upcoming Wharf Cat debut, Structure. Water From Your Eyes wade into straight-faced sub-genres with tongue-in-cheek wit and undoubtedly know-how for their most staggering project yet.

Influenced by Scott Walker’s sole 80s release, Climate of Hunter, and the echoing works of the color-field painter Mark Rothko, Structure’s cavernous dance pieces serve as the hypnotic bedrock between spoken-word monologues, cinematic numbers, and an ostensibly cheery opener. The seven-minute-long epics “My Love’s” and “Quotations” are sprawling and borderline excruciating, with both tracks deploying sawtoothed loops and grooves capable of hypnotizing even the most passive of listeners. Like Rothko’s contradictory depiction of the static and kinetic, Water From Your Eyes invite listeners to chip away at Structure’s stoic facade, to take a closer look at its detailed handiwork and trace the cracks in the mirror.

Despite its titular implications and arty conceptual aesthetics, Structure is more lighthearted than it is self-serious, with the only actual “structure” being found in its tracklist. “The important thing to remember is that this is weed music,” Amos says. “There was not a single drop of work done in the recording, editing, or mixing process that was not preceded by a spliff.” Bitingly witty in their respective solo projects, both Rachel Brown and Nate Amos naturally apply humor to Structure, a record which reflects the band’s lock-and-key creative process. “It’s like solving a puzzle with a ton of different answers,” offers Brown, whose lyrics are plucked from their own journal and filtered into Water From Your Eyes’ musically calculated format.

When put together, Structure’s fragmental base only bolsters its effectiveness as a sequential whole. The opener, “When You’re Around,” was originally intended for a film that was never made, while “Monday” is a song for a film that doesn’t exist. Both tracks serve as eerie precursors for Structure’s paralleled sides. Avid listeners will revel in repeated plays to uncover the record’s melodic subtleties, rhythmic minutiae, and lyrical repetition. Structure is a first-class achievement in brutalist pop: it’s dreamy and dissociative, nuanced and hypnotic, and weaves together threads for listeners to unravel with each spin.

DAZY

Big room hooks with bedroom production. That’s the ethos of James Goodson, the, well, everything behind Dazy. Since releasing his first single in August of 2020, the Richmond, VA-based songwriter has been using Dazy as a vehicle to make the kind of music that he always wanted to hear, and he’s been making a lot of it. By the following August, Dazy had already put out enough material to release MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD: The First 24 Songs (Convulse Records), a sprawling collection of the project’s first year. Now, Goodson has set his turn-and-burn approach to the side in service of crafting something that was initially antithetical to his whole mission: Dazy’s debut full-length, OUTOFBODY.

“A lot of Dazy has been about pushing myself out of my comfort zones, and at first that just meant finally putting out new music at all,” he explains. “I’ve always played in bands and made music, but before Dazy I’d been sort of stuck for a while. I never stopped writing songs but I wasn’t sure what to do with them, and they were piling up on my computer for years.” The project’s flurry of early releases was Goodson’s way of shaking off the nerves about sharing music with the public. “There’s something about doing singles or EPs and putting things out quickly that helped me rip the bandaid off–I also just think they’re fun,” he says. “But once I got into a rhythm with that, I felt like I had to push myself again to make an actual album.”

Released by Lame-O Records, along with a cassette version from Convulse Records, OUTOFBODY walks a sonic line between the two labels. There are the loud, noisy, abrasive tones you’d expect from a record on Convulse, and the rich, textured harmonies of a Lame-O band. That’s because Goodson doesn’t take influence from one scene; instead, he set his sights on entire eras. “I think I just wanted to take the initial concept of the band–which was referencing what big-room rock music was 30 or 40 years ago, but asking, ‘What if you made that at home?’–and push that as far as it could go,” he says. “I think that’s the Dazy sweet spot: trying to make songs that feel big but using means that are a little rougher.” And so, despite the inherently more ambitious nature of making a full-length, Goodson took his usual approach at home, in the spare bedroom, with a couple of small amps and Garageband. After narrowing down the potential tracklist from over 100 songs, he spent countless hours writing, recording, and obsessively tinkering. The songs were then sent to Justin Pizzoferrato (Dinosaur Jr., Wild Pink, The Pixies), with whom he’d been working since the first Dazy release, to be mixed and mastered.

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Zebulon

Water From Your Eyes / Dazy

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