Douglas Dulgarian has a phrase for every piece of food that just doesn’t taste like it’s been sold: “Disney bread.” It comes up on ‘trainers’, an early standout from They Are Gutting a Body of Water’s astounding new album LOTTO, with an awareness that music can sound just like that, even when it costs nothing. As the most pioneering band in modern shoegaze, they could capitalize on a fantastical, watered-down version of a sound that’s only getting more popular, especially on their first LP for a bigger label in NYC’s ATO Records. They could shroud everything in glitchy layers of artifice and mutter poetic lyrics that mean nothing for the rest of their careers. Dulgarian’s way of avoiding that was making a record he’s deemed “too real” – confessional, euphoric, and achingly, nauseatingly beautiful. “I finally feel the comforting, familiar feeling of potential sleep rising up through the bile in my throat,” he says on the first song of a record filled with truths that are hard to stomach. But there’s hardly a feeling of finality to it – against all odds, it’s another fruitful beginning.
1. the chase
LOTTO’s opening track might as well be called ‘the choice’. In anguished spoken word, barely drowned by the whiplash guitars and open hi-hats that surge throughout it, the narrator ends up torn between two very different expressions of loving surrender: one defiant in the face of death, and another driven straight towards it. “Because true love is a long and enduring thing,” he intones in conclusion to a barrage of dreamlike, tactile imagery, “like the addict in the street using against their will.” The simile, of course, violently underlines how seeing yourself in them, slipping up, can sabotage that other long, enduring thing. The music TAGABOW makes here comes eerily close to emulating the “blissful mush” he spirals over, leaving you itching for more.
2. sour diesel
‘sour diesel’ flashes back to the narrator’s childhood, going straight to the source as it interrogates early signs of fixating on and responding to pain. “I am the host/ The father the sun and the ghost,” sings Dulgarian, whose father worked as an auto mechanic, before delivering the album’s first gnawing hook: “First person/ Let me love you like I don’t/ Sit tight kid/ ‘Cause you’re never going home.” His voice careens between haunted and assertive, as if simultaneously remembering and feeling in the past. A sliding electric guitar persists through the song’s quiet outro, nagging.
3. trainers
An early highlight, ‘trainers’ revisits the store introduced on the album’s opener but mentions no subject, enhancing its ghostly, hallucinatory effect. Dulgarian’s singing lasts for less than a minute before the band once again kicks up the distortion, weaving in a few psychedelic layers before ending the song in sudden suspension.
4. chrises head
Though far less steeped in electronic experimentation than an album like Destiny XL, the record still utilizes those synthetic elements in contrast to its irrefutable humanity – transitional, temporary, rapaciously entrancing.
5. rl stine
Sitting outside the local bodega is a man that Dulgarian sees himself in. “I always buy him a pack of Newport hundreds, knowing full well that he will trade it for crack,” he said in a press release. “I wonder sometimes if it’s the addict in me, enabling the addict in him, or if I just fully understand his struggle. Perhaps we’re the same after all.” You probably won’t gather as much just listening to the song, where his words are now barely legible and frigidly poetic, the instrumentation sounding bigger and more punishing the slower it’s played.
6. slo crostic
Opening the record’s second side is a two-minute instrumental that refreshingly breaks down TAGABOW’s dense sound to its individual parts: Ben Opatut’s deceptively simple drums, a soaring guitar lick rounded out by thick bass, clicking together so seamlessly you can’t wait for chaos to ensue.
7. violence iii
Which is precisely what we get with ‘violence iii’, an even shorter track that’s gloriously disheveled, fitting right in with the band’s ‘violence’ series. It opts for a cleaner shoegaze sound, giving Dulgarian’s vocals the space to earnestly resonate – “I could have the world and still the want behind” – but gets blown out when the stillness gets too loud.
8. american food
It’s telling that TAGABOW chose the least noisy track on the album as its lead single; the clarity is unnerving, letting its message on American culture sink in. Perhaps eager for an existential mantra, I was quick to mishear the track’s vocoder refrain as “Tell me there’s a better world/ And I’ll go get knocked up,” when it’s actually “Tell me there’s a better one/ And I’ll go get my gun,” which invites deeper listening. Dulgarian’s narration returns, still in the first person but less self-reflective, armed with a broader social consciousness. Peering through a world where growth translates to the refinement, not the end, of cruelty, you can’t help but succumb to the anonymous voice of hope.
9. baeside k
There hasn’t been a song in a few that kicks off with blazing guitars, and ‘baeside k’ delivers exactly that. Dulgarian gets a little self-deprecating: “When real life kills my high/ A carousel for quotes/ They’ll love me when I die.” Though he caustically laments about how “Summer came and went/ I didn’t get to swim,” the sincerity of the next lines is too big to miss: “I’m grateful for my life/ It could have never been.” It’s ambivalent yet undeniably human, stormy yet melodic.
10. herpim
I can’t imagine listening to the first few minutes of ‘herpim’ and feeling like you’re on solid ground: the closing track ramps up with disorienting guitars – an ethereal riff backed by pulverizing bass – and restless, shaky drums. When Dulgarian’s voice comes in, it sounds like the last thing you’d want to hear coming through the PA on a flight. “We couldn’t land where we intended ‘cause there’s storms/ But now we have to/ So I need you to buckle in/ Keep your wits/ So we begin the descent.” When skittering percussion and thumping bass kicks in – the trance – you can’t help but feel like the descent is a metaphor, just one body, one band surviving. If they had to land somewhere, we’re lucky it’s this place.
