Toronto-based Weaves have gotten their fair share of (entirely deserved) hype from a choir of impossibly hip tastemakers. Their debut, self-titled album on Kanine Records (Grizzly Bear, Splashh, Chairlift) oftentimes feels primal, yet it’s tinged with new, raucous musical permutation. Its emotional representations are presented in shocking color, wailing guitar and purposeful noisiness, polyrhythms and oscillating tensions that could break your heart and for that matter, all your ribs in collateral damage. Fractures aside, as an art rock outfit, Weaves fill each track to the brim, conveying scalding feeling in scintillating architecture. Lyrically, the album finds quiet vulnerability and declarative, bald-faced observation, night and day without clear boundary. In this way, one gets a sense of something riot grrl-esque in spirit, evolved into something more experimental for this new age. It is jarring, angular and violent, as any confessional should be.
“Birds & Bees” is easily my favorite track. It pulsates with a kind of sexual menace, offering a nebulous scenario falling between syrupy pop empowerment and the messiness of sex and desire, IRL. There is a jarring contrast between the sugar-sweet innuendo “I’ll dream of the birds and the bees/and think of the world on my knees” and the repetitive force of “don’t think of me as you” and “I can’t be left alone” as refrains. They echo with hints of playful, demented, instability, crashing down with the instrumentals, gory and heady and swollen with inferred meaning. The guitar cuts into this track with demanding flourish, an interloper without regard.
There’s a muted longing that gets conveyed throughout the album, rubber-banding between abstraction and the observational. “Eagle” feels like an organic, meandering dismissal of self-aggrandizing thoughts, deliberateness as a way of living. Instrumentally, there is a relaxed rhythm to this song, cut with spontaneous interruptions and guitar riffs that drift off the edge of something, over and over again. It’s arty and feels nearly improvisational, in league with the song’s lyrical intentions: “everything ain’t always gotta be everything.” The album’s final track “Stress” begins with a languorous rhythm that pitches back and forth, deep and campy with the purposeful foreboding and lull of a stoner metal riff. The track presents images of stifling, of imperfection, notes of “I do not want the blisters” and “I cannot breathe congested,” as desire for unblemished happiness, the physicality of the untroubled. The track’s refrain, “I want to live stress free amongst the trees” pitches up with Burke’s vocals. We dream of a Someplace, far away and green without scrabbling power dynamics, without insecurity and noise.
Weaves are thoughtful people doing weird things, aware of the moments of affective madness that grip the majority of the general population from time to time, in new relationships and old, in loneliness and togetherness, stimulation and boredom. As an experiment, they stretch these particular moments of confusion out, painting them glorious and distorted, with gleeful and overwhelming humor, energy and musicality. For times of love and war as we face them, unfair and enlightening as they might be.
