Thursday, May 30, 2024

Album Review: The WAEVE - The WAEVE

Describing The Waeve's sound in an exaggerated and effusive style would feel very appropriate.* Inspired by English folk melodies and the wide rolling weft of their native isle's countryside, Graham Coxon and Rose Elinor Dougall transpose a mossy draft of emotions and an acquired affinity for subtle baroque opulence into a tapered longitudinal sweep, which settles like a knife wound into a specific cognitive bailey, sinking deep into the fabric of rising sentiments as if it were a moat awaiting a siege. Though grounded in the unsightly sap and living flesh of hard-wrangled epiphanies, the actual experience of hearing the album is like an encounter with something distinctly unnerving in its ephemeral weight- like walking step-in-step, in a mirrored pace with your own shade on the opposing bank of a river- a harbinger you wish to flee as much for the doom it presages as the fact that such an unappealing omen shares your face and your unfortunate habit of appearing where it's not wanted. This kind of intimate terror of course permits candid access to a reflective dialectic of gracious ambiance and boney protuberances, a cross-section which is grimly evident from the surface tension cultivated by the lushness of the duo's melodies, the quivering suspense of their chord progressions, and the plangent, brassy groan of Graham's saxaphone, but which becomes all the more gruesomely obvious through the keeling allure of their lyrics- a constilation of entryways permitting you to sink your fingers between the ribs of a warm, bleeding animal to feel its life pulsing within a pinch of your fingertips- holding its fate in your hands as a darkening sense of finitude closes in like a thundercloud. Travel with The Wave over the hills and gates of blind perception as the wind lifts the wings of a wary crow over the high precipitous of a rocky shore, rising ever higher only to plunge like a lost tooth into the jagged overturn of the sea where the sand and salt will polish you into a crocked golden coin to be washed up on shore to await your chance to deposit the cursed heaviness of unsettled years onto the next wearied traveler.  

Know no limits with Transgressive Records. 


*While I'm an admittedly creative writer, what I actually feel compelled to do for this release is write in the old NME parlance, but as an American, I'm afraid I lack the right mix of cultural experiences and surliness to pull it off.