Photo by Will Watt
Greg Reynaud got his start playing in a wide variety of bands in El Paso, Austin, and Houston, from punk projects to Flaming Lips-style electro-pop. For the past few years, he’s called South Korea home, working as a teacher but still making music as Midway In Wake. Heirs To The Storm is his second release under that name, and it’s a beautiful merging of a DIY aesthetic with something more expansive than your typical bedroom recording. It’s a concept album about some unnamed catastrophe, and the ten songs all detail that event but from ten different perspectives. Reynaud played all the instruments and created a painting for each of the tracks. The record is a multimedia labor of love, something uniquely out-of-step with a lot of professionalized music these days.
But that context isn’t necessarily required to enjoy the music. Reynaud constructs whole worlds using relatively simple materials. “They’ll Come For Us” is a rhythmic assault, galloping on top of spiky guitars and Reynaud’s detached, cloudy voice. The anxiety is palpable, but there’s comfort in the homemade.
“They’ll Come For Us” appears on Heirs To The Storm, out now via Lowatt.
–Art Levy // host, Sunday 10 a.m. – 2 p.m., producer, My KUTX
