The group of musicians loosely (and reluctantly, on their part) grouped under the slowcore moniker in the early 90s left behind a glut of material that's ripe for rediscovery. Leading lights Low have carved out an enduring legacy, but their former peers, including the desolate sounds of former Sub Pop act Codeine, Jeff Martin's brittle Idaho, and hushed Trance Syndicate signings Bedhead, are rarely cited as touchstones by contemporary artists. The slowcore approach ostensibly took impossibly sad material, both musically and lyrically, and pushed it into a hemmed-in framework, where feelings of agitation and despair were expressed in the same forlorn way as a resigned late-night drinker slumped over his umpteenth whiskey at the bar. Occasional traces of this sound do surface-- Mogwai are clearly fans of the wrenching emotional heave at the center of Codeine's music-- but it's rare to find a band so clearly indebted to the style as Texas three-piece True Widow.
But there's a lot more to this band than a generous nod toward their slowcore antecedents. For one thing, True Widow's guitars are much louder and grittier, with a vast bone-crunching slab of murky distortion laid thick over the snail-paced grooves they settle into. They've even taken a stab at coining their own genre, "stonegaze," to describe this sound, although it's perhaps unwise to assume this is anything other than an inter-band joke. Some of the titles ("Blooden Horse", "Skull Eyes", "Doomseer") suggest material that is far darker than the wares actually on offer here, but it's clear that True Widow get their kicks from throwing a spanner in the works on occasion. It's there in the mysterious, over-long, but strangely fitting title of the record, and in the mix-up of Josh Homme-style churning riffage circa the first Queens of the Stone Age album and the floaty, angelic vocals of bassist Nikki Estill on the opening "Jackyl".
That song is a fine demonstration of this band's complete mastery of control-- the seething guitar sound of Dan "D.H." Phillips makes it feel like they might spin off into recklessness at any moment, but they never do. Instead, True Widow slump into ennui and remain locked down there for the duration. The majority of the vocals are sung by Phillips, who enters the fray with "Blooden Horse", which compliments Estill's cooing with pangs of foreboding and cold-sweat rumination. The lyrics are wrung out with the same shaved-down discipline as the music, where nothing ever topples over into over-wrought emoting. Despite this rigid adherence to restraint, much of this material proves to be emotionally affecting-- Phillips' work peaks on "NH", which plays out like a slo-mo dip into the bleak blues of Mudhoney's "If I Think" and Codeine's "D", with great lashes of poignancy added via Estill's heavily reverbed backing vocals.
The sludge-like pace rarely abates, but there are variations in mood, principally in the lengthy "Boaz", which Phillips floods with light through a soaring vocal line that pulls the song out of its squalid origins. The only true misstep is "Night Witches", the sole concession to a quickening of pace that ends up feeling forced, especially as we are immediately dipped back into the mire with the wonderfully doomy "Wither". The torporific riffing of the closing "Doomseer" is where True Widow sign off, and they use its nine-minute runtime to subtly evolve their sound, with odd whistling noises at the midway point and a surprise lurch into a different time signature. There's even a subordinate push out of their lockhold groove when Phillips hits a guitar solo two-thirds of the way in, causing the song to peter out into ambient noise. But "Doomseer" ultimately embodies everything this band does so well, where those basic slowcore tenets-- raw emotion tightly mastered and boxed into a corner where it's antithetically filtered into barely restrained stoicism-- are given another welcome gasp of air.
