A few months ago, the Brooklyn label Captured Tracks asked how Molly Hamilton would describe her band Widowspeak's second album to someone who's deaf. "Almanac is like moving into a big old house in the woods with sheets covering all the furniture, and then taking all the sheets off." The languidly-voiced singer may have been referring to the group's actual experience recording in an old barn in the Hudson River Valley, but the description works on a more intrinsic level as well. The crackling of a fire that begins opener "Perennials" burns off the home-recording dust that has been trailing them since their debut October Tape EP, clarifying the song's ringing guitar line and sharpening the indefinable edges of Hamilton's croon. You can practically hear the snap of the sheets as Widowspeak unveil their new sound, expanding upon the hazy, "Gun Shy"-slinging pop Americana that encouraged them to move from the Pacific Northwest to New York in the first place.
With Widowspeak, Hamilton and guitarist Robert Earl Thomas settled into uncovered ground between Ennio Morricone, Cowboy Junkies, and Neil Young. The interplay between Hamilton's lilting melodies and Thomas' stiff-legged, articulate riffs gave definition to what in lesser hands would just be sepia-toned retrospectives. Songs like the skeletal "Limbs", with haunting background vocals crawling through the wreckage of a violin, were refreshingly familiar but also shocking; like a lost photograph of a childhood memory from a different angle. More than their contemporaries and immediate predecessors trafficking in similar themes, Widowspeak were filtering everything through a more self-aware light, perfecting Amanda Petrusich's idea that Instagram makes you to feel "nostalgic for a time you never actually knew." (Even Almanac's album cover is a self-proclaimed homage to Wings, Sound of Silence, and the Carpenters LPs, with Hamilton coyly looking up at Thomas in a vintage dress undoubtedly gleaned from an overpriced Williamsburg rack.)
With a traditional framework capable of supporting layers added by co-producers Kevin McMahon and Thomas, on Almanac they further pursue Widowspeak's lines of inquiry into mariachi, spaghetti western soundtracks, and 90s sad-rock, to a certain extent abandoning their original goal to "hang back as much as possible." They coalesce the darker elements that hung around Widowspeak like an ether into something more tangible. Growling, they stalk through the album, bringing "Rhiannon"-like undertones to "Dyed In the Wool" and a sense of inevitable malevolence to the psych-leaning "Locusts". A new focus on low-range brings out even more of the "creepy Disney soundtrack folk group"-- Hamilton's original idea for a band called Widow's Peak-- behind the spidery banjo and baroque accordions in "Thick as Thieves".
Hamilton's interest in eschatology also influenced the record, which she wanted to record before the forecasted Mayan apocalypse: on the churning "The Dark Age", she preaches, "We have ourselves to blame/ We had our years to play.../ It's getting kind of late/ Don't know what you're waiting for." It's an electric song, with Thomas' guitar solo bursting to the surface like a churchgoer being released from possession by Hamilton's priest. "Ballad of the Golden Hour" turns on another epic shift, segueing seamlessly but suddenly from a slide guitar's anthemic strumming to something more sinister. Before the bridge, Thomas starts climbing up and down the scale with predatory guitar licks until Hamilton slows down the song's verse and rhythm. Her use of indelibly associated phrases like "as the crow flies," "as good as gold," and "long in the teeth" punctuate the song with almost cinematographic vividness, although it's a pity they come at the expense of subtler lyrical moments elsewhere like the double entendre "We made the bed/ And built our legs."
Those moments of instrumental and idiomatic grandeur suggest that Widowspeak is almost mythologizing itself, especially during Almanac's more experimental second half, in which each song renders genre staples so effectively they listen like remastered B-sides. "Minnewaska" sways between Hamilton's soothing background sighs and samples of crickets, and she breathes over the ethereal torpidity of "Storm King" in the vein of Nancy Sinatra's version of "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)". Even "Sore Eyes", which comes the closest to Widowspeak's tumbleweed romanticism, intimates the band's expanded representation of itself, not unlike a cover. This is Almanac's greatest strength and also its weakness. Widowspeak is moving forward in its evolution as a band with promising conviction, but at this point they're exploring a lot of different paths. Without a singular narrative to tie it all together besides Hamilton's lovely but noncommital exhalations, it's a little too easy to lose interest. Now that the end of the world is behind us, however, Widowspeak can focus more precisely on how they'd like to be remembered.
