Winifer Odd - Everything Descending CS
Winifer Odd began in 2018 when Darius Lerup started writing for what was intended to be a 'clean doom' project. Over a series of demos, the music increasingly gravitated towards the stylings of early American post-rock pioneers Slint, Codeine, and Red House Painters (christened 'slowcore' by genre pedants). Feeling an apt musical vernacular for a Californian displaced in the great cold distance of London, this would form the primary musical direction for what became Winifer Odd’s debut ‘Everything Descending’. Lerup was ultimately joined by long standing musical collaborator Adrien Tibi (Feigur), who was enlisted to produce and play drums on the album, helping to cement the album’s distinctive dark and delicate sound.
‘Everything Descending’ marries slowcore’s tender, confessional voice to the histrionic moods of doom metal on one hand, and a guitar-led progressive sensibility on the other. The result is less a collection of independent songs and more a narrative arc, teeming with dramatic highs and lows belying the album’s glacial pace and languid vocal performances.
The opener ‘Cold Blue Touch’ presents a stripped-back, Felt-inspired prologue over which Lerup sarcastically responds to betrayal by crying over spilled milk. This is followed by ‘Anxious Angel’, a lamentation about friendship fading with age that inexorably builds into a nagging EBow line that would make any shoegazer weak in the knees. ‘Shiner’ weaves a gauzy, lulling instrumental tapestry that gives way to a wall of sound musically staging revelations of neglect and avoidance. A fleeting intermission leads into ‘Paper and Sand’, in which a verse-motif recounts a collapse of fiction and reality, punctuated by progressive instrumental flights. A wistful slide guitar introduces the title track, which tells of the climber who, ascending the peaks of ambition, inevitably tumbles down onto the cold earth of self-doubt, drawing the album to its heavy and sombre conclusion. On the heels of the COVID era and its persistent isolation, 'Everything Descending' feels intimately engaged with the colours and moods of the present moment.
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