One of my favorite albums as a kid was Rust Never Sleeps by Neil Young, particularly side two. “Powderfinger”, “Welfare Mothers”, “Sedan Delivery”, and “Hey Hey My My (Into the Black)” are seared into the farthest recesses of my brain. Neil’s guitar sounds like a weapon, an over-driven battleaxe of social commentary, exploding off the vinyl like a Molotov cocktail tossed through the window of a pawn shop at two AM. Rust Never Sleeps is the hot girl who wears sweatpants and a crop top at home, and then straps on a black mini-skirt and three-inch heels for the club. Two vastly different approaches to fashion that don’t change the fact that the person who wields the clothes holds all the beauty. And nothing to me, at that time, was more beautiful than the sound of a guitar.
Water From Your Eyes understands this beauty. For the better part of the last decade, the Brooklyn-via-Chicago duo has been exploring just how many different ways one can drape the sounds of guitar around one’s shoulders. Their live shows are incendiary displays of noise, their touring band acting as an extension to the scaffolding singer Rachel Brown and guitar player Nathan Amos create on record. In fact, it’s sometimes hard to find the recorded versions of the songs buried underneath the distorted chaos of their live show. In this sense, Water From Your Eyes is much like living in the modern world: they are entrenched in the digital and analog worlds of existence, and understand that these two places exist in different spaces. Like the acoustic side one of Rust Never Sleeps, and the explosive distorted side two of Neil’s classic album, Water From Your Eyes is everything all at once.
The album starts with the watery interstitial of “One Small Step” before it blasts off with the gloriously quirky “Life Signs”. With its changing time signatures, the song is like a body that’s entered atrial fibrillation, off kilter and life threatening. Rachel Brown’s Midwestern drawl, a fascinating drawing point to the Water From Your Eyes repertoire, lingers around the propulsive guitars like an American shaman. Lyrically, Brown’s words echo the unpredictability of Nate Amos’s riffage. Lines like ‘Tick-tick, you’re alive/Sunlit sick sky scraped by bright-eyed short sight online/For thy cathedrals are built, unbuilt, rebuilt/Unwavering guilt, pools of rain heaven spilt’ play with the cadences and rhythm of consonants and syllables, making for a wild ride into the netherworlds of indie rock.
Second song “Nights In Armor” is a joyous celebration of navigating life with the confidence of a warrior. ‘I just want to fight you cause I’m tired’ sings Brown, both an entreaty and excuse. Like “Life Signs” before it, the guitars twist and pulsate around a circular bassline. The songs on It’s a Beautiful Place come across as carefully crafted electronic explorations of time signatures and journeys into melody, all drenched in copious amounts of guitar. Segueing into the next song, “Born 2” is like Weezer on two hits of LSD. The song is more tethered to reality than the previous songs, but is still trippy enough to make you question reality. Amos’s grungy downstrokes and Brown’s laconic singing place the song on the precipice of accessibility, but keep it just so far out of reach that you realize this is not your prototypical pop song.
And, trust me, there’s nothing prototypical about the music Water From Your Eyes makes. “You Don’t Believe In God?” is one of several interstitial pieces on the album that break up the six songs into distinct sections. While there’s certainly no thematic structure to the album, these interstitials act like chapters in a book. It’s a moment to take a brief pause and reflect on what you’ve just heard before you dive back into the narrative. “You Don’t Believe In God?” is a sonic exploration of belief and disbelief, as Water From Your Eyes‘s spiritual connections seem more aligned with the Flying Spaghetti Monster school of religion than any other monotheistic God that’s made this world an insufferable place to be.
“Spaceship” begins the chapter on this spiritual journey. Backwards masked guitars and explosive drums accompany an exit from the stratosphere into lower orbit, as if the band is searching for answers in the vacuum of space. “Spaceship” makes room for the Charli XcX-inspired “Playing Classics”, an album highlight. The song showcases the band at its electronic best.
If lead single “Life Signs” was the grandiose opening to an album that celebrates the electric guitar at its most adventurous, “Playing Classics” gives Rachel Brown her own vocal showcase. Brown’s vocals are pedestrian at best, but herein lies their charm. On “Playing Classics”, with its great opening line ‘Look- I’m concerned as a matter of fact’, Brown pseudo-raps her way through the storyline (or lack thereof). A four to the floor beat moves the simple melody forward. Layer after layer of noise is stacked upon top of the song, one melody bleeding into the other. By the fourth verse, Brown’s sung melody underneath the rap is an infectious, nonsensical exploration of language (‘Practice, shake it, two, three’ Practice what? Shake what? Why stop at three? Why start at two?) Water From Your Eyes might make you ask questions, but you most certainly won’t get any answers.
“It’s a Beautiful Place” and “Blood on the Dollar” are smack in the middle of the Neil Young worship, but a worship that’s been morphed through five decades of artists who have done the same, from Daniel Johnston’s lo-fi explorations of love to Sonic Youth’s next stage nihilism. Even the title “Blood on the Dollar” elicits feelings of early ‘70s southern California drug-drenched ballads. Ending the same way it began, the watery intro of “One Small Step” gives way to the lunar dust kicking up from “For Mankind”. At a little under half an hour, It’s a Beautiful Place is a clear and concise slab of modern guitar music and Water From Your Eyes’s finest moment.
‘Hey, hey, my, my‘ Neil Young sang over forty years ago, ‘Rock and roll will never die‘. On It’s a Beautiful Place, Water From Your Eyes shows that there is, indeed, ‘more to a picture than meets the eye‘. The album twists the guitar kicking and screaming through the past twenty-five years of this 21st century, and Rachel Brown and Nathan Amos have found a way of squeezing the modern world through the digital and analog meat grinders of yesterday and today. What’s come out is the finely ground meat of rock and roll – a thick, filling slab of music for the starving masses of 2025 and beyond. Neil, I’m sure, would approve.
Great read! This review really captures the eclectic, trippy vibe of Water From Your Eyes. The way you describe the shifting sounds and Rachel Browns unique voice brings the album to life. Love the comparisons to Neil Young and the electronic explorations – it’s a well-thought-out analysis of a complex, engaging record. Highly recommended!