Music Matters
The Brooklyn duo visited KUTX while in town for Levitation Fest
By Jeff McCord
“We don’t even smoke pot anymore,” Rachel Brown confesses in a recent interview. “We have meetings.” Brown, along with guitarist Nate Amos, make up the Brooklyn duo Water From Your Eyes, a pair so finely attuned to one another’s quirks that the outside world seems all but a weird distraction. Signing to Matador Records might have upped their business activity, but you’d never know. The bizarre aural collages that frame their 2021 classic Structure take even more twists and turns on their latest album, Everyone’s Crushed. And they’ve been doing this for a while; their first recording dates back to 2017. Their lyrics can be poetic, but mostly travel a somewhat predictable indie-rock path of malaise (there’s a track called “Buy My Product”). Yet there’s no figuring out where the duo’s creativity is taking you next. The music leaps, lurches, abruptly halts, then explodes, often within a few bars. It’s abstract, unsubtle, almost indecipherable, but never unlistenable.
Live at KUTX, Brown was the opposite of standoffish, working to engage the audience, as if fighting back on the strangeness of hearing their music on a morning session – a weird pastiche of LaMonte Young and Aphex Twin. That evening, their Levitation show amplified everything – the speed, energy, intensity – as they blended seamlessly with a laptop spitting out sounds alternately furious and orchestral. Brown howls, mutters, and interjects, peering over their dark glasses as if hunting for prey. Whatever their state, there’s no mistaking their hallucinogenic power.
