NOTE: By joining the Graveface Record Club (click HERE for details) you’ll receive the limited, numbered ( /300), hand-poured edition + CD + Cassette.
Whirr is back with yet another solid record! If you’re into the modern shoegaze stuff coming out lately (i.e. Nothing – Guilty of Everything) then you’re in for yet another treat. The first single “Mumble” has been released and although it stays true to their shoegaze background, we see a slightly heavier element coming into play this time around.
If you’re a fan of this stuff, stay tuned! Whirr’s Pipe Dreams is going to be getting a special treatment soon!! While you’re at it, be sure to check out the rest of Graveface’s catalog. Their Record Club might just be for you (and it’s one hell of a deal too!).
The Details
GRAVE118 - Whirr 'Sway' out 9/23/14 on CD/LP/Tape/Digital (pre-order here: www.graveface.com/graveface-catalog.html)
When Sway begins, you might at first press pause, reaching for your headphone wire or peeking behind your speaker cables to make sure nothing has come undone. The blister of distorted guitar that opens the album comes only from the right channel, howling and hanging there in irascible isolation until it seems that something must be wrong.
But be patient: After a dozen seconds, the rest of Whirrâa five-piece of blanketing rock focus and comforting pop finesseâpours in from the left channel. They meet the guitar in the middle, together racing headlong into a short section thatâs heavy as metal but pliable enough to be the springboard for the galloping shoegaze beauty that soon arrives.
For the next 36 minutes, you need not worry again about lost connections, split channels or anything else, really. More than any Whirr release to date, Sway creates a definitive sense of immersion, sculpting an environment that breathes you in instantly and breathes you out only when the record snaps into silence.
That bifurcated start is an appropriate image for Whirr in 2014. Last year, the band headlined a tour with the Philadelphia group and fellow admirers of heaviness and harmony, Nothing. Not only did the crews become fast friends, but their respective foundersâWhirrâs Nick Bassett and Nothingâs Dominic Palermoâdecided to start a group of their own, Death of Lovers. When the shared tour was finished, Bassett headed to Philadelphia for a month of writing and recording. Heâs never really left. He calls Philadelphia home now, so Whirr has become a bicoastal band.
In Philadelphia, Bassett worked on Death of Loversâ debut for Deathwish Inc., toured as the bassist for Nothing and steadily composed new material for the next Whirr album, their first full-length for Graveface. Back in Oakland, the rest of Whirr had committed to the project full-time, too, so the West Coast contingent wrote and rehearsed new material without Bassett. Joey Bautista took the lead on two songs, Loren Rivera on three.
Indeed, against most odds, Bassettâs move made for a more democratic Whirr. In their salad days, Bassett had written most of the material and built the bulk of the arrangements, too, using the support only to enrich and enliven them. After a slew of splits and singles and EPs, Sway is the second Whirr LP, but it is only the first to be rendered by a fully functional rock band, having shaped the songs slowly and over some distance.
Before the quintet entered Oaklandâs Atomic Garden to work with longtime producer and collaborator Jack Shirley, they reworked the contributions of all three writers, massaging the material into a cohesive dynamo. Rivera, for instance, rewrote the words for Bassettâs material, folding his songs into the albumâs presiding sense of dusky melancholy.
âItâs not conceptual, entirely, but itâs intended to ebb and flow in a certain wayâone song being aggressive, then dropping out and being pretty but devastating,â Bassett says. âWe tried to create an atmosphere, where you listen and get vibed into one tone. â
That rhythm presides over Sway, tying its distinct parts into a seamless unit. The restless âHeavyâ churns somewhere between Godflesh and Gish, its lumbering beat and foreboding guitar buoyed by a melody that feels like a secret hymn for which youâve long searched. Gorgeous and sprawling, âSwayâ floats through luxuriating guitars and pillowed vocals, offering an impressionistic but intoxicating inversion of Whirrâs typical propulsion. Even here, during the recordâs prettiest moment, Whirr maintains a righteous minimalism, emblematic of members who met one another as skateboarding high-school kids.
âThe aesthetic of the band is more aimed at mature punk rather than alternative rock,â Bassett confirms. âThere are these more aggressive punk elementsânoisy feedback, a snare roll that just goes into super-punchy, driving songs.â
âClearâ brilliantly paints its lyrical quest for lucid communicationââI want words/to understand you,â runs one plaintive, surging bitâin music that takes up the same challenge. Whirr pushes past a pastel instrumental haze into a hangdog march, with near-whispered vocals bruised by Devin Nunesâ drums and Eddie Saldagoâs orotund bass line. But as the end approaches, the band builds together, the riffs and the rhythm colliding into one triumphant, redemptive crest.
And thatâs the victory of Sway, too, an album written by five people on two coasts but executed with the force and splendor of, at last, a fully unified Whirr.
Graveface will release Sway on CD, LP and digitally September 23.
Price $20
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