In an interview promoting his new album Guitar, which happens to come out on the same day as Water From Your Eyes’ It’s a Beautiful Place, Mac DeMarco – the archetypal indie rock prankster, a label also applied to the NYC duo of Rachel Brown and Nate Amos – talked about “the Robin Williams effect.” He explained, “Robin Williams is all fun and games, and then you watch Good Will Hunting and you’re like—fuck. It’s good.” Funnily enough, Amos joked that Williams is “a silent member of Water From Your Eyes” in press materials because a poster from the Mork & Mindy era hangs in his bedroom, where he still makes all the music for WFYE, which now sounds bigger than ever. But the Robin Williams effect is also not a bad way of describing It’s a Beautiful Place, which is characteristically silly, freaky, and clunky – because what’s more awkward than making sci-fi indie rock about cosmic existentialism – until its vast emotional range hits you. In the “long hard road from here to the truth,” as Brown puts it on ‘Playing Classics’, the band hardly stays motionless, let alone cynical. Silly, yes, but undeniably soulful and striking.
1. One Small Step
Teasing the record out of formlessness, ‘One Small Step’ is a whirring 30-second soundscape that cuts to the single guitar note that ignites ‘Life Sings’. It positions It’s a Beautiful Place on that cosmic scale where “everything’s just a tiny blip,” but leaves you dizzy with awe at this strange place you’ve found yourself in. You can’t quite call it beautiful yet, but it sparks your curiosity.
2. Life Signs
The nihilism of 2023’s Everyone’s Crushed seems to resurface on lead single ‘Life Signs’, but something else snaps into view. “Tick tick you’re alive,” Rachel Brown mumbles, matching the dense, vivifying riffage that reaffirms the duo’s punk spirit. “Sunlit sick sky scraped by bright eyed short sight online.” With Al Nardo and Bailey Wollowitz of fantasy of a broken heart now part of their live iteration (when I interviewed fantasy for an Artist Spotlight, Amos, twice featured in the series, dropped in to offer fresh cups of coffee), this is WFYE not just testing but fully realizing their full-band potential, beefing up dazed, half-formed meditations on the dichotomy between tradition and progress. If imagination’s the key, they’ve got plenty, yet would much rather bust the door open.
3. Nights in Armor
‘Nights in Armor’ projects the record’s sci-fi imagery in an interpersonal context, as Brown taunts: “Fight me I burn brighter.” The evidence presents itself in waves of fuzzy guitar, swirling bass, and crashing drums that make for an irresistible groove. Just as it rushes into your bloodstream, the music comes to a halt, and Brown intones, “Gold rush.” Crash. “In a dream.” Bam. “Home.” Then, like ‘Life Signs’, it sucks you back into its orbit, burning the riff – or dream – into your brain.
4. Born 2
The title’s double entendre – as in “born to behave,” “born to believe,” etc., but also the album’s second attempt at really thrusting you into its world – points to the group’s sense of humour. With unrelenting shoegaze guitars and full-on blastbeats, it is a burst of molten absurdity that buries Brown’s voice and theoretical preoccupations, challenging the innate notion that “the world is so silent.” It is a whirlwind, and paradise does not in fact await you on the other side; you have to grab it while you’re here.
5. You Don’t Believe in God?
Amos and Brown, who were both raised religious, take a moment to consider, if wordlessly, the faith they’ve just crushed into chaos. “I wanted to be a priest when I was little, before I learned that you had to be born into a different kind of body to get to be the one who directly talks to God,” Brown recalled. “It was there that they began to lose me, although I have retained some belief in something like God.” That retention shines through a brief but stunning interlude, which is naturally cut short.
6. Spaceship
Amos’ collagist tendencies, scraping together frantic percussion and textural strings, turn maximal on ‘Spaceship’, which liquifies the band’s barrage of influences into something hypnotizing and strangely digestible. This is what indie rock may sound like to aliens capable of absorbing and spitting out decades of it at once. But they’d be at a loss when faced with the grief abstracted in Brown’s lyrics, which humanize the song into more than a sci-fi experiment.
7. Playing Classics
Brown was elated when Amos brought a disco song to the table, one that unapologetically nods to Charli XCX’s ‘Club Classics’. More than latching onto Brat Summer, it captures the exhilarating buzz of seeing her live right before it exploded, at Primavera Sound 2024. What’s surprising is that it becomes the album’s undisputed centerpiece: after a series of deconstructed, psychedelic, and downright ambient moments, it’s a delight to hear Brown’s voice loud, clear, and assertive, as Amos’ relatively crystalline production unravels: a thumping beat and euphoric house piano that devolve into a dance-punk riff, reminding us this duo is old enough to have liked other things before Brat. And to utter things like, “We’ve got modern idols for the end of an age.” Idols change, but the end is perpetual – which explains why so many songs on It’s a Beautiful Place respawn before it’s really game over.
8. It’s a Beautiful Place
As if WFYE’s Frusciante worship – a not-so modern idol, if you will – wasn’t evident on practically every track on the album, the band dedicate the title track to it, nearly a full minute of woozy soloing. Even the album cover reminds me of one of the Chilli Peppers guitarist’s solo LPs, Inside of Emptiness. “Even the soft things have a heaviness to them,” Frusciante said of that album, which easily rings true here.
9. Blood on the Door
WFYE going alt-country isn’t so unexpected when you can picture MJ Lenderman, Brown’s boyfriend, joining them onstage for this one. Understated as it is, it’s a gorgeous, gentle song – the only one with lyrics by both Brown and Amos – that carries the whole album’s striving optimism. The narrator puts a lot of stock in the art of an indelible melody that’s capable of transcending space and time: “I don’t want to watch you die,” Brown sings, “Maybe that’s the reason why.” It’s frayed like a song that emerges at the end of a long tour, when exhaustion begets truth, and maybe even their own version of faith. “God, make me that wind,” they plead, a vision of triumph that goes against scripture.
10. For Mankind
Instead here we are, again, as God is called to make his enemies, “like whirling dust, like chaff before the wind.” Scattered, small, substanceless even. The end is indistinguishable from the beginning, almost, until you actually try looping it over. Then you’ll want it to end over and over again.
