Over six records spanning nearly 20 years, Widowspeak have veered from plodding goth slow-burns to ambling, Rumours-indebted indie-rock songs. Their atmospheric releases feel like a series of rooms you step inside, where you can pick up the glass ashtray and nudge the shag carpet with your toes. On their seventh album, Roses, the band turns their curatorial instincts to romance, filling ten new songs with the froth and fantasy of a heart-shaped tub in a highway motel.
At their best, these ballads have a whiff of Julee Cruise melodrama, a dreamy, Quaalude-induced haze. On “Wondering,” sung from the perspective of a waitress who could clock in at Twin Peaks’ Double R, Molly Hamilton delivers the lines, “You’ll never leave the table/Wondering,” with a pregnant pause between them, as if she’s considering a literal prisoner of love. Her distinctive voice has been Widowspeak’s emblem since the band first emerged, warbled like Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval over CB radio. Here, it’s particularly fitting, as ethereal as the fantasies that inflate workaday love. “No Driver” is a Badlands-style ode to the getaway car, Hamilton’s breathy melody backed by Robert Earl Thomas’ nimble guitar riffs, cresting like a speedometer on an empty stretch of highway. Hamilton and Thomas, Widowspeak’s two main members, have day jobs as a waitress and a carpenter, respectively, and that grounded reality makes the push-pull between the dirt and the cosmos all the more convincing. Love and daydreaming are a respite from dirty dishes and unpaid bills.
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Album standout “If You Change” marries a rumbling bassline with the sunny sensibilities of The Byrds’ version of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” It’s a declaration of love whose perspective flies in the face of modern therapy babble: Don’t change, and if you do, not too much. “Don’t want mint condition,” Hamilton coos to a lover. “You’re gonna get dragged in the dirt/You’ll get faded and worn in/Soft as an old T-shirt.” “Hourglass” closes the record in an “Unchained Melody”-style waltz, Hamilton musing flatly, “Woke up and the dream was lost/Caught a cold on my day off.” This candor and humor is a welcome departure from the self-serious indie rock of many of Widowspeak’s more successful peers, and it recurs often on Roses, from the music video for “If You Change” (in which a missing stuffed animal comes to life in Los Angeles, like The Velveteen Rabbit with BMX bikes) to lyrical wordplay like, “Heaven is waiting/Waiting around.”
There are instances where the band’s dream sequence begins to stutter, like “Actor,” an inoffensive extended metaphor about the roles we play (“Everyone’s a child star or a leading man”), and the melancholy of the pining lover sitting in the audience. It lands like a five-and-a-half-minute sigh alongside the album’s more vital tracks. Similarly, “Hourglass” builds to a pale Robert Fripp guitar solo but begins downshifting as soon as it’s over, the denouement the only signal there was ever a climax. Widowspeak’s paean to love leans towards Valentine’s Day, all sugared hearts, hangdog puppies, and stuffed bears holding platitudes; a touch of the real thing underneath it, in its pulse-quickening glory, would offer a meaningful contrast to the paraphernalia.
