The Decibel Tolls

The second album by husband and wife duo Windy and Carl, Depths, is a total immersion in psych-rock’s love of distortion. As waves of feedback cycle past, you hear maybe two or three notes ring out, fighting their way past the overdriven din.  Unlike My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, which countless critics and listeners got once they heard the melodies underneath, Depths isn’t about using overdriven feedback and loop pedals to transform rock music, it’s about making those things the whole show. And yet there are melodies there, or at least repetitive pleasant tones. If Windy and Carl were trying to make difficult music, they would constantly shift the structure of the music and interject dissonant notes and sounds just to keep the listener off balance; instead they find a few gorgeous notes, then rinse (in layers of feedback and echo and reverb) and repeat.

Because the group uses such simple melodies, interjecting a minor note or chord has a huge impact on the mood of the song. On “Sirens,” a reoccurring minor chord spoils a two note ascending melody line and the whole song becomes tense and scary. And yet, by the end of the song, you’ve adapted to this sound and what sounded tense before now sounds majestic. In a similar way, “Undercurrent” begins as a menacing ballad, with a reverb heavy bass line very similar to the one on Sonic Youth’s “Shadow of a Doubt,” but unlike that song, it never builds into a rocker, content to just be creepy and full of foreboding.

One of the most exciting things about Depths (and space rock in general) is that when it clicks with you (and chances are if you’re reading this site it’s going to click with you), you realize that dynamics in music can be very overrated. Why does a song that starts out slow and calm have to build in intensity? So many musical tricks appear to be utilized for the benefit of someone listening to a song for the first time, and those same tricks can begin to sound stale and unnecessary on the fourth of fifth listen. Claiming music like this “goes nowhere” is to assume that music has some sort of destination and that it will only ever sound fully realized when it gets there.

With song titles like “Aquatica” and “Undercurrent” and “Set Adrift,” Depths is clearly connected to water and thus–horrible, horrible cliche alert–it makes for perfect rainy day music. But don’t read “rainy day” as shorthand for melancholy and sad; what makes Depths such a perfect soundtrack for rainy weather is the way the sound of the rain on your window or the hood of your coat melds so naturally with the music, or the way the music mimics closeness to water without total immersion in it.

On more recent albums like Consciousness and 2008’s Songs for the Broken Hearted, Windy and Carl have begun to clean up their sound a little bit, and as much as I like the way better production has revealed the beauty of their guitar and bass work, I also miss the heavy, frayed at the edges sound of their earlier stuff. There are moments on Depths where you can hear a guitar note bend and break under the weight of distortion, and that for me so perfectly sums up the way space rock fulfills psychedelic rock’s mission of finding beauty in pushing sound to its breaking point.

MP3 :::
Windy and Carl – Set Adrift