Female Gaze – Linea Nigra
Release date: October 23rd
Record label: Fort Lowell
Genre: Psychedelic rock, art rock, desert rock, post-rock, jazz rock
Formats: Vinyl, digital
Pull Track: Bury You
The Tucson, Arizona trio Female Gaze came to my attention in 2024 thanks to Tender Futures, their debut album. Guitarist/vocalist Nelene DeGuzman, bassist Kevin Conklin, and drummer Nicky David Cobham-Morgese (the first two of whom previously played together in The Rifle) probed the outer reaches of power-trio psychedelia on that five-song, thirty-two minute LP; I said that it “explores the desert using empty space and towering nothingness as its language”. Female Gaze have returned this year with their second album, Linea Nigra, another collection of southwestern desert-psych that DeGuzman says is inspired by “navigating labor, delivery, and the prospect of mothering while the world is on fire”.
The forty-six minute Linea Nigra contains twice as many tracks as Female Gaze’s previous LP, but the trio haven’t abandoned epic-length songs: the title track, sitting right in slot number two, stretches its crawling expanse to over ten minutes in length, and there’s a trio of six-minute songs in the fluid, brisk “The Center Cannot Hold”, the lumbering “Sa Loob”, and the fuzzy closing track “Happysadfree”. Like Tender Futures, Linea Nigra is a quietly intense album in which it’s easy to get lost–the songs on this one are a little more discrete this time, but Female Gaze are still pretty far from embracing traditional rock/pop structures here (the closest they get to them is in single “Bury You”, which is a welcome outlier). For those interested in bands making their own little worlds in their records, Female Gaze have continued to prove their ability in this niche with Linea Nigra. (Bandcamp link)
