Review Summary: rubbed eyes after the awakening
This album sounds like someone reaching for the stars while they are trapped within the sedimentary earth, slowly sinking yet never crying for help. I say this because there’s a strangely beautiful dichotomy occurring within
Time Well, the sophomore effort from the Indiana slowgaze three-piece. While they have always hinted at being fond of a sludgier sound, they’ve never embraced the murky fusion with such delicacy and elegance. Fascination bred in conditions unclean and forsaken, something that is axiomatic during the unusual inclusion of the American spiritual ‘Were You There’ (entitled here as, simply, ‘Hymnal’). It’s a song that is naturally floating and captivating, yet Cloakroom push its sacred boundaries by muddying it up with brooding distortion and a dampening bass. For a central track it’s more than apt, revealing not only the album’s core motif but also the band’s haze-induced obsession. Like staring at a turbid, opaque puddle; there’s still beauty to be found within its reflection.
Over the course of 10 gritty shoegaze tracks, the band never stray away from their inspirations and attractions. Contrasting elements manifest themselves in the form of night and day on opener ‘Gone but Not Entirely’, a song that details the discovery and explosion of a star. Its bright, soft vocals swirl with the fractured particles: a soothing, warm blanket on top of fuzzy, galactic destruction. The afterburn of the intrinsic distortion continues throughout the album but in different phases and filters. When the image is icy cold and urbanized, it is emotionally provocative and exultant, as seen with the cyclically repetitive yet entrancing ‘Concrete Gallery’. Although this journey features a late night walk through the sleepy city streets, the venturers aren’t afraid to later soar across the flickering twilight sky within the comfort of a bluesy abandoned barn. ‘Sickle Moon Blues’ is just this, highlighting a domestic, folky guitar riff along with a sharp baseline that’s gnarled and broken yet supportive of its counterpart’s aspirations. Albeit buried and gentle, the vocals never stray from their pop-struck melodies and origins, making their potency thrilling just by instrumental contradiction. This symbiotic relationship consistently peers its head out across the rest of the moonlit record. It’s a contemplative night alone, filled with high and lows that stand as antitheses of each other -- mirroring a reflective journey into the snapshot-like “dreamories” within one’s mind. Although closer ‘The Passenger’ authenticates these hazy flashbacks in a cliched 9-minute production of blacks and whites, pales and lucidities, it serves as a satiating last kiss.
Time Well represents more than just a stick in the mud; it’s a poignant flag thrust into the malleable earth and it aims directly upwards.
