Like another married and long-running team, Yo La Tengo's Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan, Windy & Carl's focus on craft means they can be trusted to continually improve. The Michigan-based duo have been working with shoegaze, dream pop, and ambient music for 15 years, and their mastery sounds effortless. Maybe it has something to do with working with a spouse-- there's always someone around to call you on your bullshit. Intimacy whittles away at the ego-driven blind spots where poor artistic decisions happen. It's like working with a mirror. You can't fool yourself.
And intimacy suffuses Songs for the Broken Hearted, a hushed, ascetic collection of long-form ambient compositions. Some of them are purely instrumental; great banks of fog lit softly from within. Sometimes Windy moves through them like a small figure with a lantern, as if searching for a way out, her voice a whisper amid a slow, steady gale. In turn, we feel as lost and lonesome as she sounds. That might not read like commendation, but it is. The album is sad, but not melodramatic; it's the quiet, complex suspension of feelings that informs adult sadness. Anyone who's been in a long-term relationship knows that intimacy and loneliness are not mutually exclusive.
There's nothing flashy about "Btwn You + Me", but its airily opaque drone (comparable to works by Christopher Bissonnette and Belong) is formidable, and Windy breathes into it so subtly that her voice sounds like part of its shapeless mass until it fragments into wisps of language. "La Douleur" is just as uncompromising, a work in low rumble and high shine that seems continually to surge over a 12-minute arc. "My Love" breaks the colossal structures of the first two tracks into glittering shards, with discernible traces of the guitars Windy & Carl process into impenetrable sheets; "Rhodes" striates them like a Growing track; "When We Were" bends them into monkish hymns. Throughout the formal variations, nothing feels out place or breaks the mood. That sort of refinement simply comes with practice.
But craft will only get you so far, especially in ambient music, which becomes blanker as it approaches the ideal. To fill that blankness, you need feeling, of which this album has a surplus. Its genesis looks something like this, according to a blog post by Windy: They made the initial recordings for Songs the same weekend she began her solo album, the equally austere I Hate People. As she worked obsessively on her solo album, Carl worked obsessively on these recordings. (This was a period of unspecified sadness for the couple.) Eventually, Carl gave Windy a CDR of the finished tracks; she listened to them and cried. Finally, she turned to her journals and found the words she couldn't seem to write. "What was happening/ Between you and me?"
Picture them: Windy & Carl, pursuing their private obsessions on different sides of a wall, trying to say in music what they couldn't say to each other in words. Even when the lyrics are hard to make out-- which they often are-- there's no mistaking their meaning. You can hear it in the distance between the words and the sounds, the beginning of each track and the end, what's said and what isn't. And that depth, those vast empty spaces, is what makes Songs for the Broken Hearted so enveloping and so remote at once.
