no fire no world: Water From Your Eyes burn down and rebuild
If I could describe the new Water From Your Eyes album It's A Beautiful Place I would say it lives at the intersection of art and technology. No, no, I am just kidding—it lives at the intersection of Pure Moods and Guitar Hero. Can a good riff take you to a new spiritual plane? Can a snippet of broken piano provide much-needed lubrication to your third eye? Rachel Brown and Nate Amos say yes, 1000 times yes.
Everyone's Crushed, the 2023 album that launched Water From Your Eyes into solid Hey Have You Heard This? territory, was a weird one. Oblique, a little difficult, knotty, "art rock." The noir vibe palette of their album art made sense. The sound was quite gray to me—not millennial gray, but the gray-silver of a can peeled of its label and tossed into a huge pile of cans, clanking loudly, knocking over can piles. It's a Beautiful Place has some vibrant color to it...hex codes beyond #000000 and #FFFFFF.
The video for first single "Life Signs" is a great fakeout; it kicks off with black-and-white footage of the band (Brown + Amos, plus bassist Al Nardo and drummer Bailey Wollowitz) but quickly shuffles into the color zone, modulated through flickering tube TV and grainy camcorder footage, Brown sometimes wearing a buglike outfit featuring cerulean tights and gloves. The It's A Beautiful Place album cover is a rich blue, the promised compact disc a fetching tomato red. There's been some color-correction over the past two years, some experimental saturation.
WFYE are a unique apparatus. There's no moment too small for them to blast into something mega, no "organic" element that can't be mechanized, and vice versa. An intricate, twisting lil riff on "Nights In Armor" proliferates into a full-on lolling headbanger. The chaotic twin guitars that open "Spaceship" would be cool enough on their own, but they morph into new rhythmic shapes over the course of the song, like a scrap of plastic slowly melting in a campfire; the track eventually accommodates an outburst of miraculous strings that propels the whole system onto the celestial plane.
I don't think we're talking about Niagara Falls or a Caribbean island when we talk about the album's titular "beautiful place"—something more macro is at stake. The psychic scale is very big, at least as big as a building (a cathedral, in the case of "Life Signs"), sometimes as big as a planet. "The world is so beautiful / but born to machines," Brown sings over the synthetic sludge of "Born 2," one of several songs that attempt to reconcile a destructive, industrial existence with a constructive, human one. I'm reading Don DeLillo's Underworld right now and just got to the part where Brian Glassic freaks out at the sight of the Fresh Kills Landfill, which spent 46 years as the largest landfill in the world until its closure in spring 2001. He is agog at the the way the vast refuse forms a natural-ish structure, gross but amazing:
In a few years this would be the highest mountain on the Atlantic Coast between Boston and Miami. Brian felt a sting of enlightenment. He looked at all that soaring garbage and knew for the first time what his job was all about. Not engineering or transportation or source reduction. He dealt in human behavior...and the question was how to keep this mass metabolism from overwhelming us.
Can we occupy space and time as our freaky selves without fucking things up? Seems unlikely. We're doomed to keep heating stuff up and burning stuff down. "The world...is born to become something else / Something melts," Brown sings on "Born 2." On "Nights In Armor," they resign us to our fate: "No fire, no world."
In the end, everything can be worked out on the dance floor, or that's what I tell myself each time I hit the club. "Playing Classics," my favorite of the Beautiful Place singles, dog-walked me the second I pressed play. The plastic toy techno stylings and sand-dry delivery might have kept this song on the safe side of indie detachment, but that goofy, jumbled keyboard part has other ideas. Better ideas! This is smart and dumb, happily co-existing, like that one bumper sticker image; this is ironic ecstasy shading into non-ironic ecstasy, like Madonna's "Ray Of Light," but the one played on Family Guy, where Peter Griffin drinks a bunch of Red Bull and then sees the face of God.
Water From Your Eyes
"I just wanna dance, architecture, no rent," the mechanized backup vocals chirp. Just because something is unrealistic doesn't mean dreaming isn't fun as hell. And dreaming, as cool New York art-rocker Debbie Harry once sang, is free.
I miss the vibes and commerce of Peak Internet Buzz Band era. It was exciting to throw one's metaphysical weight behind a righteous cause in the form of a good album by a cool band. Also the sponsored parties had lots of free alcohol. But that dead environment would never work for Water From Your Eyes. They can't be reduced to simple clichés and won't dig their own ruts simply to become easier to blog about. Switch-ups are a good thing. Marquee banger "Playing Classics" is followed by the sweet, earnest, Sheryl Crow-as-trainhopper ballad "Blood on the Dollar." The Fresh Kills Landfill reopened as a sorting area for Ground Zero rubble, and now it is a park, with reclaimed wetlands. You can destroy things and build them again, build them up to the sky or out to the edges of the deep blue water, if you want to.
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