Widowspeak – Almanac

Widowspeak – Almanac (Captured Tracks)

This Brooklyn band’s 2011 debut garnered them a lot of comparisons to various druggy ’90s bands. Singer Molly Hamilton’s sedate vocals in particular recall Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval, but Robert Thomas’s jangly guitar lines helped make it more stimulating than a mere homage to their opiate source material. The inspiration for their follow-up was the then-impending apocalypse, and although it retains traces of doomsday imagery and dread, Almanac certainly doesn’t sound like mankind was meant to perish without ever hearing it. Rather, it resembles its namesake, an annual publication noting the timing of regular but subtly shifting celestial phenomena in the coming year: reflecting a fatalistic acceptance of the cyclical nature of life, well-rounded, and a definite progression from their earlier work.

by Carly Blair