A pair of gorgeous, meditative, cinematic tracks by the Austin, Texas experimental indie rock band fronted by Jonathan Meiburg, heralding their upcoming album, The New World out on 31 July via their own Polyborus label and Secretly Distribution. Reminiscent of the of the music of Mark Hollis/Talk Talk, Shearwater have been making cerebral, grand and delicate sounds for 25 years, often mixing the intimate with the widescreen. On this latest music, comment Meiburg: “If you’re like us, you wake up feeling like the world’s on fire, and hoping you could reckon with it if you knew where to begin. Daydream Unbeliever and More and More come from this uneasy place. If they help you feel a little less insane, welcome home.”
Daydream Unbeliever has a classic Shearwater grandeur with soaring strings and a gong smashed by Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart, and a video filmed and edited by Meiburg during research in Antarctica. More and More is a journey inward: church bells and birds recorded in Berlin give way to a song about escaping paralysis. There’s a feeling of gently building pressure and widening scope as a halting piano becomes a wild, insistent forest of strange and beautiful sounds, including a qanun, a cello squeezed through a Leslie cabinet, and a 12-string guitar that sounds like it’s 20 feet tall.
To explore and enjoy more by Shearwater, see also the other embedded links below.
Nothing is ordinary
Elephant ear, coyote eye
Sing in an older language
Hold the lens up to the light
Or wander around in hell
And never decide what
Strength is
I'm a daydream unbeliever
Daydream unbeliever
Coming to take you over
Though the wine is watered down
Thrums like a premonition
The heartbeat of real life
He says
Only the strong survive
He don’t
Get to decide
What strength is
I'm a daydream unbeliever
Daydream unbeliever
I love my unbelief
Nevertheless
You’re surrounded, inside
Walk down to where it’s lighter
The word is out, and it says:
Forget all that you knew before
Rain lifting off the Cascades
They’re telling you it’s dangerous
More and more
Sun rising like a red blade
Through the silence
Even stillness lies
To slake one appetite
You’ll kill a million cultivars
Cry
But you’re blind to mistakes
How can you know
If you’re wrong or right?
You’re chafing at the restraints
I’m spinning out angrily
More and more
And racing down the riptides
Wish mе well, then
Drop a dime on mе
They’re leaving on the next plane
You see it in every pair of eyes
You shiver in the new rain
Go under
Or swim through the night
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