For all the characters Nicole Schneit slips into on Parting Glances, all the lives she touches upon and then runs from, she can never seem to sing her way out of her own head. The Brooklyn songwriter’s second record as Air Waves jettisons some of the twang that marked 2010’s Dungeon Dots, opting for urban chug over playful Americana but still holding fast to the guitar as a nucleus for her songwriting. And though she brings on collaborators like Lower Dens’ Jana Hunter and Ava Luna’s Felicia Douglass, Schneit winds up streamlining her sound instead of expanding it. Parting Glances hones in on her laconic delivery and dry touch on the fretboard, never losing its poise but rarely getting too visceral, either.
As a lead vocalist, Schneit also keeps her cool. Her sandy, stoic timbre mingles easily with the treble- and cymbal-heavy orchestrations she wraps around it with her three bandmates. When she sings over Hunter’s low harmonies on opener "Horse Race" and centerpiece "Thunder", it’s like we’re hearing two sides of the same artist. The voices twin each other, leaving just enough space to cast shadow in the valley between them, and lending an extra slice of depth to a sound field that tends to skew flat.
The lyrics on Parting Glances err toward the simple, too, but even the most well-worn lines work when folded into their surroundings. When Schneit sings "Someone take this pain away from me" in the first few measures of "Fantasy", she cracks the last word into two syllables, two notes, like the pain itself can’t be contained inside the words she uses to alleviate it. "I’m not sure what it’s about/ 'Cause the meaning never came," she sings, and she doesn’t plumb further. Her pain and its weight never resolve themselves; they just circulate in an endless four-chord progression while she sings like she’s trying to keep her head above water.
"I’m a bad man for coming around/ But you invited me here," Schneit proclaims on the enigmatic "Frank", one of many songs where she traces only the shadow of a character and lets us do the work of filling in the rest. Most of Parting Glances works invisibly like that—the album won’t stand out for its depth or its guts, but finds its stride in its smarts, in Schneit's knack for elliptical storytelling. These aren’t the richest stories you’ll ever hear, but they're enough to hook you along for the ride.
