Album Review

What’s amazing about Portland quintet A Weather isn’t that the band
were signed to Conor Oberst’s Team Love label before they’d logged live
shows numbering in the double digits—it’s that five musicians
could make music this hushed and intimate. Cove, the band’s
recent debut, uses question marks and ellipses to punctuate tentative
tales of relationships and gentle explorations of tangled emotions;
like Low, they’re masters of minimalism who seem to create dynamics out
of thin air (or muted volumes).

Singer/guitarist Aaron Gerber and vocalist/drummer Sarah Winchester
trade lines like best friends or ex-lovers, whispered voices
intertwining and then unraveling over the band’s sparse arrangements,
divulging private secrets and revealing touching vulnerability. Emo
bands may pride themselves on wearing their broken hearts on their
sleeves, but A Weather prefer to delicately explore the language of
bruises, armed with the knowledge that a wince is infinitely more
interesting than a scream.

While there’s not a dull song among Cove‘s nine tracks
(quite a feat considering the restrained palette the band choose to
paint with), there are certainly standouts: Opener “Spiders, Snakes”
begins with a somber drum roll and almost funereal keyboards before
miraculously managing to make the lines “don’t get your hopes up/keep
them low/try not to reach so high/hard work won’t pay off in the end”
sound uplifting; “Oh My Stars” is as sigh worthy as its title suggests;
and “Pinky Toe” uses the analogy of that hapless digit’s trials and
tribulations as a metaphor for the narrators’ propensity for heartache.
They say God is in the details, and A Weather meticulously map the
tricky waters of modern romance, giving gorgeous voice to an exquisite
combination of complexity, confusion, and ambivalence.

A Weather play Sun May 18, Sunset Tavern, 9 pm, $8, 21+. With
Radar Bros. and Facts About Funerals.

Sasquatch

Nessie

Chupacabra

Jesus