The Weird Weeds are as Warm, Weird as Ever [Album Review]
Over seven years and four full-length albums, Austin’s Weird Weeds have settled comfortably into an aesthetic of cultivated artiness. The style could be described as invitingly strange or vague to the point of alienation, depending on one’s appreciation of droning guitar instrumentals and lyrics about feeding your lover garbage.
The Weeds’ fourth album, Help Me Name Melody, is perhaps more inviting than their previous work, featuring layers of warm, jangly guitar tones arranged in a choppy cut-out fashion with an emphasis on texture and atmosphere (the bottom end comes courtesy of newest member, bassist Lindsey Verrill). Suffice it to say, the combination works, and their drone-y sound is as engrossing as ever. The band’s indifference to things like song titles (four of the spaces on the track listing are simply blank) only strengthens the album’s focus on ambiguity and atmospherics.
The avant-garde-meets-folk-traditional “I Ain’t Got No Family” winds its way through various iterations of family-lessness, rendered in beautiful three-part harmony, as heavily effected guitars pulse hypnotically on either side of the sound field. At only three minutes, the song feels much longer, but in a good way. Contrast this with the malevolent follow-up track, “Baby,” in which various threats of physical violence float over jazzy minor chords and squalling e-bowed guitar, and the album’s emotional terrain begins to come into focus. The relationships explored in the lyrics are just as ambiguous and vague (but are as strongly conveyed) as the music. In this context, the album’s title becomes less a word-puzzle and more of a declaration of intent, with the band providing their music to the listener as a blank canvas on which to explore their own emotional landscapes.
Help Me Name Melody will be released September 14th on Autobus records, and the band is playing two album release shows this weekend:
September 10, 8pm: Annie St. Arts Collective
September 11, 6pm: End of an Ear
While the record is excellent, the stage is where the band really shines, so we definitely recommend trying to make it to one of these shows.
