Widowspeak
All Yours
Release Date: Sep 4, 2015
Genre(s): Pop/Rock, Alternative/Indie Rock, Indie Rock, Alternative Singer/Songwriter
Record label: Captured Tracks
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Album Review: All Yours by Widowspeak
Very Good, Based on 4 Critics
Based on rating 8/10
For Widowspeak, the years after the release of 2013's Almanac and the Swamps EP were marked by departures and returns: Molly Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas left Brooklyn for the Catskills and reunited with Woods' Jarvis Taveniere, who produced their debut, when it was time to make All Yours. Using his gift for making any album he works on sound effortless, Taveniere helps them embrace Almanac's velvety country and classic rock even more fully and naturally, with results that sound more fresh-faced than theatrical. Compared to the duo's other albums, All Yours is downright restrained: "Hands" echoes the gentle drift of their debut even though it glides along on tasteful strings and keyboards instead of distorted guitars, while "Narrows" transforms the duo's lingering shoegaze impulses into shimmering drones.
Based on rating 6.8/10
Widowspeak unabashedly and openly take bits and pieces of rock, folk, and country history to make a pop Americana sound that feels antique. The band’s last full-length, Almanac, showcased a lively, psychedelic strain of '70s rock'n'roll, and their following EP, The Swamps, was a bluesy, banjo-plucked ode to the Southeast. But Widowspeak's third record, All Yours, seems to strip away the group's hyper-referential past sound to something more sparse.
Based on rating B-
On their third album, Molly Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas walk out of their own fog. As Widowspeak, the duo made their mark beginning in 2010 with an idiosyncratic blend of widescreen Americana and frosty shoegaze. They used to be big fans of the word “cinematic” to describe their own work. The pair largely wade out of both pools they used to draw from with All Yours, which lolls in a mellow nostalgia tinted by the pains of heartbreak.
Opinion: Excellent
The third album from Brooklyn’s Widowspeak has the classic backstory of a contemporary folk-rock album that has come to be something of a cliché. Since the release of the Almanac and The Swamps EP in 2013, Molly Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas (the band have been a duo since the exit of original drummer back in 2012) decided upon a break from the constant stimulus of the city and so moved to the hills of the Catskills & Hudson Valley area for peace and inspiration. As I said, cliché.
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