TRUE WIDOW - As High As the Highest Heavens and From the Center to the Circumference of the Earth (Kemado)

On the recommendation of Dan, the man who sets me up with so much of the material I review, I brought home True Widow's "As High As the Highest Heavens and From the Center to the Circumference of the Earth" a couple of weeks ago and threw it on the stereo. Wheeler, my gadfly girlfriend, was in typical form, ready to toss in her two cents within seconds of opener "Jackyl." "Is This Grouper?" she asked with more than a bit of sarcasm. "No," I replied. "Is it Zola Jesus?," her snark growing. "No," I responded, growing increasingly annoyed. "Is it Earth?" At this point, smartassness aside, I realized Wheeler was kind of on to something; True Widow is some seriously dark and heavy shit that deftly tows the line between dreampop/slowcore/shoegaze and doom, never tipping too far in one direction or the other. It's also rather good too, making it more than worthy of her esteemed comparisons, even if they were made to get on my last nerve.

Ridiculously long album title aside, this album lacks buoyancy, but it absolutely rocks. It rocks like Codeine rocked, or Spacemen 3 when they weren't tripping balls, or The Jesus & Mary Chain when they weren't writing pop songs. To give you an idea of the sonic universe that the Dallas trio are exploring (as if the above references haven't already), "NH" starts out like a Melvins' song, before invoking Low for inspiration. It's a slow and crushing piece that enjoys only a slight uptick in mood when guitarist/vocalist Dan Phillips and bassist/vocalist Nicole Estill harmonize on the track's vocals, similar in the manner of Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker. The band allows the track's mid-section to breath, introducing enough space into the number that it moves from sludge rock to slowcore without missing a beat. The song illustrates how effortlessly the band navigates between poles, creating a sound more muscular than slowcore and more hazy and hallucinatory than metal. Certainly other bands have attempted this sort of thing before, but True Widow nails it.

Other tracks flirt with melody and mid-tempo speeds like "Skull Eyes" and "Wither," adding dynamics to the record that may not be evident initially, since everything is filtered through a distorted early-90s fog that paints the band's sound in the red, blue and yellow lights of a smoky club where leather is prevalent. "Night Witches" is the closest thing here to a high intensity rock song. It recalls the more dangerous side of Spacemen 3, and proves that the band can up the tempo without losing their sense of dread.

If there is a single drawback to True Widow it is that they are the sum of their influences. I typically loath comparing bands to other bands, but in this case the comparisons are unavoidable. True Widow are certainly not the most original group in the world, but they don't need to be. It has been so long since someone has mined these sounds so well that they benefit from making a record like this amidst the remnants of chillwave and lo-fi. There is something so purely rock about "A.H.A.T.H.H.A.F.T.C.T.T.C.O.T.E." that it sounds like a breath of fresh air, or rather a welcome blast of oppressively dark and musty haze. Recommended.

"Skull Eyes"


"Night Witches"


"Jackyl"