OUR RVW: “A blanket the size of a skyscraper placed in a bunch like a handful of picked, dark purple raspberries unloaded into a wheelbarrow.”
A cloth drill boring into a soft tooth, cleansing the area, removing decay, hope.
Without pain.
The swirling of the threads, overlapping in excessive speed weaving throughout the rot, and rubble, relief.
Quiet calm, as the cave in the center of the clay-like bone opens wide to reveal the hollowed cleanliness of a new moment.
You can hear it in the triumph of the driving drums in “Wasted Hours,” a perfected definition of Lauds sound, in wide-open, hopeful, interlocking parts and places. McKay Glasgow and J Holt Evans, began this project as a songwriting partnership which has morphed into an entirely massive sound, incorporating musicians to help fill and create an atmosphere that settles under and through each song and sound. The congruence in the feel of this album is wholly cohesive, while each of the songs live in their own rooms and apartment numbers, nearby, same building, individual.
There’s an endlessness to the tangles of electric guitars that sweep and crest and dive and lift, and the sound, the tone feels infinite. Glasgow and Evans share majority of credit for the guitars on this album, and by the sound of it, the two have developed a language within the way the strings and chords mesh together, split apart and walk parallel paths, only to re-cross and peak like spires standing as marble columns up into the heavens, clouds coating the ornate tops, so we can only see momentary glimpses of all the sound actually represents.
Lauds works in never-ending sound, while sprinkling microscopic details along the way to keep the pace and atmospheric latitudes stretching and growing.
It’s one of those tiny capsules you place in water, and the shell dissolves to reveal a sponge that expands into a shape of a duck or a dinosaur, but this sponge continues growing until it overtakes the sink, then the room, then the floor, then the house, and out the windows, into the garden and up into the sky.
Vocally, Glasgow heads up the majority of the singing and delivery, while Evans appears on a handful of tracks, leading and directing. The two work in a catty-corner similarity, delivering their own slice from the same surprise fruit cut from the branches of a shaded tree. Glasgow gleams a little more up front, with a voice sailing over the top of the shifting ships of guitars and bass. See “Somehow,” where Glasgow calls that title out in such a way that a plane could fly through clouds, but the fluffed storm stirrers never touch the sides of the metallic needle threading through.
Evans, on tracks like “Distant Images” and “Misplace a Night,” buries the vocals a few inches under the soil, about the distance down to place vegetable seeds. The sprouts peek up quickly, but there’s a bit more between the ears and the lyrics. The guitars swirl up and above, drawing the words like a tempest capturing truths and secrets in between spinning haze.
Musically, Lauds holds to the direction started as “Parallel,” leads in, and never relents all the way through. A sound like this could become monotonous in the wrong hands and fields of vision, but not here. Each musician and piece works in extreme conditions to make sure definitions are recorded and placed in order to never lose a moment to a wash of sound.
The tiny pecking beak on the piano as an example on, “Ceedee Lamb,” which also features a Small Albums favorite Ross Page, the mastermind behind “Color Temperature.” Page accurately drives the sound of this shallow, lilac colored puddle as the piano and the guitars gently break in a breeze. There’s hints of something else to keep the sound lined like metal edging to hold the lawn together.
It feels across the entirety of the album like Glasgow and Evans, who hold the majority of instrumental credits on the album, see everything through a specific scope, and direct from that singular vantage point. Other instrumentalists are brought in to provide opportunity for different tracks, but everything is held in the hands of the soundscape sculptors and there is no room for a hint of the directive.
While the washes of sound really define the backgrounds, and the guitar work prominently leads the whole of this, the melody writing reveals such an expertise, that at times the perfection of guitars and the hooks and vocals are so interesting and well thought out that the songs can divide the brain in two places at once to keep track of everything mapping out.
Lauds as an entire entity, offers something spacious and easy to immediately get into, while moving the target gently so the focal point is hard to find, but that’s a good thing, because you need every element here to create the mass of an elemental table that Lauds is after, in developing an outer space all their own.
(Fort Lowell)
