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Bitter Widows is certainly one of my favourite bands.
Once I first heard them on my native faculty radio station a number of years in the past, I used to be instantly captivated by their mixture of delicate harmonies, lush guitars, and deft and driving rhythms. Grunge, folks, shoegaze, indie rock – they seamlessly combine these completely different parts right into a coherent complete that pulsates with life, tenderness, and a no-bullshit angle.
Their music is passionate and private, but skillful and exact. It’s the sort of music you may get misplaced in, dreamy, but on the identical time often exploding right into a sonorous cacophony that releases some internal fury you didn’t know you had.
That is actual music, made by actual individuals, expressing actual feelings.
Their newest single, “Staring Into Heaven/Shining,” is a cathartic 8-minute journey by means of grief, written by co-frontwoman Susanna Thomson after the dying of her mom from a uncommon type of most cancers. The track is available in items, vignettes that trace at different makes an attempt to make sense of such an awesome and surprising loss.
The track reaches a climax a couple of minutes in, with among the most direct and heartrending lyrics in fashionable indie rock:
If all my anger
And my ache
May catch like a flame
And purify
And cremate
Possibly I could possibly be alive
Know that you just’re protected
And you’re feeling me
We talk
Past God, past doubt
Later within the track, Thomson recollects an nearly unbearably poignant second mendacity subsequent to her mom on her deathbed, the place a momentary feeling of peace is interrupted by morning mild and songbirds, and she or he realizes she is “dropping all of it.” At this level, the guitars take over, and for the ultimate three minutes of the track, the interaction of Thomson and bandmate Maia Sinaiko’s uncooked, but elegant guitar riffs fill in an emotional area that may’t be resolved with phrases.
In a press release concerning the track, Thomson wrote: “It wasn’t till after ending the track that I spotted there will be hope in accepting that there are issues we can not learn about dying.”
The unrushed, unvarnished instrumental ending appears like an homage, an elegy, and an emotional launch . On the identical time, it’s a testomony to the longtime bandmates and associates’ synergistic artistry and talent to make one thing coherent out of one thing unfathomable. Having seen them carry out stay, I can say they’re the true deal: musicians and songwriters that maintain nothing again, utilizing all their technical and emotional capacity to speak the essence of their songs. Right here the essence appears to be the ability of merely witnessing ache, whether or not one’s personal or one other’s.
Thomson writes, “As I attempted and didn’t reconcile emotions of remorse and unanswerable questions, it grew to become clearer to me that each one I can do is select to easily observe the expertise of grief.” In sharing this deeply private track, Thomson provides the listener the chance to easily observe the outpouring of grief: at instances volcanic, at instances laconic.
In a world of pretense and artificiality, this realness appears like a uncommon present.
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