Watter is a post-rock project that just drifted into view out of nowhere and will probably exit in a similar manner. Post-rock is a genre full of such maneuvers—the Tortoise family tree, for example, is scattered with one-off projects that flickered into life then ended before they really had a chance to begin. At some point in the 1990s, you could barely pick up a record on Thrill Jockey without it bearing a credit from John McEntire or one of his bandmates. It’s possible that Watter is more of a long-term proposition, although its members—Slint drummer Britt Walford, Zak Riles from Grails, and Louisville musician Tyler Trotter, plus guests Rachel Grimes (Rachel’s) and Tony Levin (King Crimson)—clearly have other things in mind beside this band. This World is a selection of six instrumentals that plays to their collective strengths, which essentially involves slow, patient builds; acres of repetition, touches of prog-like guitar, and subtle piano and electronic elements that underpin everything at all the right moments.
If Walford comes off as something of an enigma—a view only enhanced by the recent Slint documentary, Breadcrumb Trail—there won’t be any further light shed on his character from this album. There’s a faint arc that builds through the record, essentially heading from the resolutely downcast “Rustic Fog” then expanding gradually into the light until the feeling is positively bright by the time the closing title track emerges. But mostly it’s a series of question marks and false trails, driven by music caught up in the divide between simple and complex gestures. It’s pretty, at times, with “Lord I Want More” strung out as a beautifully brief acoustic lament before it dips into murkier territory. “Bloody Monday” picks at the same thread later in the album, illustrating how well this band can settle into a comedown state, but also functioning in a place that furnishes its classicist leanings with something more avant garde, bringing to mind Bundy K. Brown’s Directions project.
Despite deviations into brevity, Watter is clearly a band most comfortable when working at length, as illustrated by the two 12-minute-plus tracks at the center of This World. “Small Business” is all loops of thickset rock guitar that only misfires when it heads toward an overly familiar loud-quiet-loud dynamic that feels like the band just hit the autopilot button and checked out for a while. “Seawater” is the better of the two longer songs, mainly because it manages to forge connections between industrialized electronics, a drum sound that has the power of Walford’s playing on the Breeders’ Pod, and quasi-medieval plucking that turns into strident rock riffing. On “Small Business” the band sounds lost, but on “Seawater” they're fully in control, carefully picking out where they want to go, using passages of repetition as a hypnotic hook to get lost in. If Watter have a future beyond this album, “Seawater” is the closest thing they have to a path worth expanding outward.
A useful companion piece to this album is Brian McMahan’s earliest work in the For Carnation, which was similarly studded with post-rock luminaries as sidemen. On that band's debut, Marshmallows, it felt like McMahan was travelling through a range of material both tightly wound and loosely constructed, all facing relentlessly inward. This World is like that, too, in the way it takes introspection as a starting point and sees how many shades of black it can bash out of it. The difference here is that Watter can see a world outside, or at least form an idea of one and head toward it. There’s hope and warmth in these tracks, even when they’re at their most gloomy. Musicians who work in this field often seem to find it difficult to talk about what inspired them to make music this way, making some of the records even more mysterious than they perhaps deserve. Certainly, Walford has struggled to explain Spiderland in recent interviews on the topic. In Watter he’s found another suitably inscrutable vehicle to skew his ideas around.
