Water From Your Eyes – Everyone's Crushed

On their new album, Chicago’s Water From Your Eyes dare to suggest experimental music can be funny

Album Review by Tony Inglis | 23 May 2023
  • Water From Your Eyes - Everyone's Crushed
Album title: Everyone’s Crushed
Artist: Water From Your Eyes
Label: Matador
Release date: 26 May

On their new album, Chicago’s Water From Your Eyes dare to suggest experimental music can be funny. Everybody’s Crushed is littered with oblique lyrics delivered with the dead-eyed sarcasm of a mumblecore comedy, while dirty guitars and brutalist sonic farts rip through your speakers. It’s thrilling to hear songs gussied up in the signifiers of 'challenging music' be so completely unserious.

Take 14, an example of Rachel Brown and Nate Amos’s downright trollish collaboration. Neoclassical plucked strings and ambient drone swell, while Brown’s voice is at its most classically beautiful. Their words though are a punchline: 'I’m ready to throw you up'. On Barley, a pop song put through an industrial mixer, they ad-lib 'shit' in such a deadpan way you imagine they must need gaffer tape to stop their eyeballs from spinning like they’re in a slot machine.

On Out There, over thrumming bass and Balearic keys, Brown tosses around a jumble of vocabulary, like a child slicing up newspapers to paste and stick. 'Track free mend three bend feed knee hands scram mud draft drag…' they go on, creating their own monosyllabic rhythm. It’s an encapsulation of the album’s diffuse musical approach, as different elements corrugate into something new.

It’s pleasingly hard to decipher if the band are at any point saying anything with any sincerity. When Brown drops the title phrase 'everybody’s crushed', you’re certain nobody is. But then, on the same song, through repetition of surrealist language, a sense of profundity appears: 'I’m with everyone I love and everything hurts / I’m in love with everyone and everything hurts / I’m with everyone I hurt and everything’s love / Loving everyone I’m with and everything hurts / Everybody is in love and every hurt gives / And with everything to love so everything goes'.

It happens on the final track too. But this time, Brown pulls the rug again just when you thought they were getting too introspective: 'There are no happy endings, there are only things that happen… buy my product'. 

The panoply of wrongfooting sounds continues: Open’s high frequency riffs hit like a migraine, and the denuded guitar of True Life asks: what if the production from Gwen Stefani’s What You Waiting For? was bent completely out of tune, stripped for parts, and anything remotely pleasant tossed away as junk? The duo says it’s all borne from unease. Their prescription is fuckery.

Listen to: Barley, Out There, Open


waterfromyoureyes.bandcamp.com