SNOCAPS – SNOCAPS: REVIEW
- Bernard Zuel
- 19 minutes ago
- 3 min read
SNOCAPS
Snocaps (Anti)
IN THE USUAL FINAL QUARTER FLURRY of best-ofs, Buble and Beatles redux, where the almost Sisyphean task of getting heard achieves levels of impossibility if you don’t have one of the Three Bs, it would be a terrible shame if this album slid by unnoticed. Especially as there’s just something about this which feels like an end-of-year summation, a wrap on things liked, recalled and re-examined in a benign light. In the warmest of lights.
That isn’t to suggest this is some rehashing by the four piece led by twin sisters Crutchfield, Allison and the ostensibly better known Katie – ostensibly because Katie is actually more familiar as Waxahatchee, the band name that isn’t always a band but is always K Crutchfield – but rather that there is an easy familiarity within and without: these moves and sounds are their roots and our comfort zone, at the intersection of guitar-driven indie rock and languid yet spiky Americana, of clear-eyed self-assessment and ultimately forgiving gaze on the world. And it is quite simply very good.
Snocaps is the sisters and fellow travellers MJ Lenderman and Brad Cook, the latter two very much in supporting blokes mode. The sisters sing together but split the songwriting across the 12 tracks, and if you look for differences you can mount an argument that Allison’s songs lean a little more to rock and Katie’s more to Americana. But I would argue such delineation ignores the fact of cross-fertilisation and shared influences, not to mention that doing so becomes some nitpicking exercise.
Better then just to go with the flow of a song like Cherry Hard Candy, a kind of autumnal reflection where guitars move and hold up an end simultaneously, the voices weave in and out of each other, and those who have gone – “long, long gone” – still have an imprint that complicates easy gestures. “You dream about the past/It was nothing, it was nothing/I’m just sand in the hourglass/I’m weighing down the burden.”
Or maybe the perpetually chugging-onwards Heathcliff, where a chorus declaring “When you go down/You’ll take me down with you” talks of wariness but sounds like sunniness; where verses sound like tension dismissing but speak of an immersion that isn’t going to be easily shaken off.
For a while it looka like the album is that it’s best when it feels like it’s leaning back even as it moves, which happens in the ostensibly bustling trio of Brand New City (imagine a mixed world of tight jeans, buckskin jackets and good dope pitching up somewhere between a less self-conscious Strokes and a sleepy eyed Byrds),You In Rehab (choppy and chirpy in a London ’79 way) or Avalanche (a jangling foot-tapper that lands musically somewhere between the other two) where the Crutchfields appear to have all the time in the world.
So Wasteland, a musical drawl that eases by, Coast, which builds up its tempo and sonic thickness but still lands unencumbered by weight, and the easy lope and vocal shimmers of Angel Wings, hold your affections comfortably.
But more time exposes you to how the extremities, as it were, pull you in, whether it is the fizzing little gem Over Our Heads (in, out and running away smiling after a mere two minutes and 15 seconds), the Dolly Parton-meets-McGarrigles moment of I Don’t Want To (a touch of Blue Hills sweetness, a splash of folk’s sharpness), or the atmospheric slow burn of Hide (vibrating at the edges, steady in the centre).
No there isn’t a Christmas song to be had here, nor are there any New Year’s resolutions, but every time I play Snocaps I feel like I’ve taken stock and emerged satisfied that this hasn’t been a wasted year. And that’s a win.
READ MORE
HEAR MORE
BANDCAMP: Listen to Snocaps – Snocaps
SPOTIFY: Listen to Snocaps – Snocaps
APPLE MUSIC: Listen to Snocaps – Snocaps
Comments