Spanish moss, brass beds, overgrown yards, burning sage. To Widowspeak, these artifacts represent the hazy, lazy birthplace of swamp rock and Delta blues, which singer Molly Hamilton and multi-instrumentalist Robert Earl Thomas fell in love with last year after touring their sophomore LP Almanac across the American Southeast. The duo incorporated these sights, sounds, and smoke into a six-note guitar riff they had been sitting on for awhile. That became the motif for The Swamps, a stopgap EP between Widowspeak’s last full-length and their next one. After hopscotching across the country from the Pacific Northwest and Chicago to Brooklyn and exploring that wanderlust in Almanac, Widowspeak have settled on a thematically consistent aesthetic that suits them.
“True Believer” is the first song Widowspeak recorded for The Swamps, and fittingly it’s the one that sounds closest to Almanac. (Thomas has said this EP, which Kevin McMahon also produced, leans more toward Widowspeak’s last record than their putative third LP). It opens much like “Locusts”, with a similarly note-bent but lower-pitched bloom from Thomas’ Fender Telecaster. Where the latter track was tightly coiled like a tense calm before the plague, on “True Believer” Hamilton literally lets her hair down (“tangled sheets, tangled hair”) and swoons into the romanticized slide guitar. The religious imagery on Almanac’s “Dyed in the Wool” can also be found in "True Believer"–“speak in tongues,” “shake off that devil fever,” “pilgrim lips”–but this time Hamilton tinges her turns of phrase with the vivid mysticism of the South’s voodoo culture rather than falling back on idiomatic poetry in the vein of “cut from the cloth."
Hamilton’s lyrics “The house was a good one, but the yard was overgrown” on “Calico” are actually a good metaphor for Almanac, a fine record that still occasionally got lost on its forays into Western and Latin themes. Most of The Swamps, by contrast, rides on opening instrumental “Theme From the Swamps”, obviously a kind of mission statement for the EP. Those six creaky, twangy, back-porch rocking-chair notes prove to be a tangible yet versatile anchor for Widowspeak’s songwriting. This time, most of the genre-specific accents–the castanet rolls on “Smoke and Mirrors”, shakers rattling in the background of “The Swamps”, tambourines stalking through “Calico” like spurs on a cowboy boot–enhance what’s already there instead of distracting from it. The only weak spot on The Swamps might be “Brass Bed”, a lovely track that suffers from simply too much going on–multi-part harmonies, twinkling pianos, and “That’s Amore”-esque guitar stylings, and awkward lyrical syntax (“Find me underneath the linen/ Trying hard to get forgiven”).
Widowspeak do their best work when they take a minute to smell the sage, not necessarily when they forge ahead into new territories; and to a certain extent the band recognizes this and embraces it on The Swamps. In a recent interview, Thomas suggested that Almanac, with its big, brassy arrangements and relatively quick tempos, was an exercise in nostalgia “backlash” while their latest collection of songs takes the opposite tack. “You can’t be too nostalgic, you can’t get caught in something like that,” he said, referring to the former. “In the swamps, you feel sticky, and slowed down, and caught. And in terms of our music, we’re never like a really fast, loud band.” He’s right: Hamilton’s languorous croon will never be able to fully escape Hope Sandoval’s shadow–nor should she try–and Thomas’ arrangements will probably always owe a fair piece to the 60s' gun-slinging theme songs of the Wild West, which have been the band's bread and butter since Widowspeak's album cover re-imagined the giant spiders from Wild Wild West. Widowspeak seem to have found a home in the swamps, and now they're inviting us in to set awhile.
