"When You're Around" is from the album 'Structure' (out 8/27). Pre-Order LP/CD here - waterfromyoure...
About the 'Structure' Album
Delighting in contradiction, 'Structure' is an ambitious LP that approaches its own impressive scope and aspiration with a tongue-in-cheek humor and a reflexive self-effacement that wonderfully reflects the personalities of its creators. Influenced by Scott Walker’s sole 80s release, 'Climate of Hunter' and the works of the colorfield painter Mark Rothko, it's a concept album that pokes fun of the idea of concept albums, exploring high-minded ideas while subverting them and applying a hyper-focused eye for detail in the service of a series of clever misdirections.
This approach is perhaps best exemplified by 'Structure'''s...structure, as the album is arranged in what Amos describes as "two matching halves." Each side of the LP begins with what he and Brown term "a movie song" (the first of these "When You're Around" was originally written to soundtrack a karoake scene in a coming-of-age indie film), which is followed by a spoken word piece and then ends with different songs called "Quotations" or ""Quotations"" (the one without quotation marks in the title "has quotation marks in the sonic waveform" says Amos). Tracks 3,4,7 and 8 all contain re-arranged versions of the same lyrical phrases, and the song entitled "Track 5" is actually the album's 6th track. All of this may sound bewildering, but the conceptual feints pale in comparison to the auditory hall of mirrors that Water From Your Eyes have created on the album.
Since their first releases the band have been grafting sonic ideas together in ways that initially feel incongruous before revealing their own fascinating logic upon closer inspection. This is taken to a new extreme on 'Structure,' which stretches out Water From Your Eyes’ experimental mentality even further, while providing some of the more overtly "pop" moments in their catalog. Those approachable moments are consistently set against the album’s most abrasive, with the band simulating harmony-heavy indie pop that recalls a sort of para-dimensional Beach Boys on the opening track before sliding into cavernous dance pieces that give way to pummeling, near-industrial explorations, that melt into stoic spoken word tracks before making space for gradually pulsating and shockingly gorgeous sonic collages.
While initially disorienting in its complexity, 'Structure' is also a deeply personal album, with many of the lyrics being plucked directly from Brown's journals. Though far from what would traditionally be thought of as confessional songwriting, these lyrical elements combine with the band's conceptual conceits and the album's deeply immersive listening experience to form an expressive document of the sensibility and mindset that Amos and Brown, long-time creative partners and best friends, share.
"We might throw around the word 'funny,' since we both seem to have unusual senses of humor," says Brown. "I think the album is funny, but in a very vague way where some of the ways things lined up naturally gave me a chuckle. The album itself when listening to it is not funny at all. It’s quite sad actually and a bit dissonant. I feel like it encompasses so much space in so many weird complex ways that I don’t even understand it. There’s emotional elements to it that I’m still guessing at. Not to be cliché, but I see it like a journey. Like going across the continent from one ocean to another in a dream world that keeps changing or you can’t grasp completely to begin with. It’s not funny at all being lost like that. Especially when the experience feels real, solid, concrete."
When taken together 'Structure' paints a picture too vast to be taken in at once, but repeated listens reveal melodic subtleties, rhythmic minutiae, and lyrical repetition that allow the whole to come into focus. Whether the lasting impression is concrete or abstract will depend on the listener’s perspective, but from any vantage point 'Structure' is a thrillingly original release and a first-class achievement in brutalist pop.