Water from Your Eyes are very much a band for these times. In interviews, Nate Amos and Rachel Brown reveal themselves to be young(-ish) people grappling with their mental health issues, immersed in the smeared culture of online memes and ’90s nostalgia while attempting to balance a worldview that holds elements of absurdity, beauty, existentialism and cosmic truths — all of which they attempt to pack tightly into the half-hour runtime of It’s a Beautiful Place.
For this seventh album in just under a decade, the duo continue their upward trajectory, finding new and casually complex ways of expressing their musical minds. Topmost in his track assemblage, Amos has uncovered a raging guitar sound that erupts in Smashing Pumpkins panoramas that are quickly struck with a shrink ray to slot back into a more compact mix. On both first single “Life Signs” and follow-up “Nights in Armor,” the cleanly defined yet ever-shifting edges of his musical compositions resemble UK contemporaries Jockstrap, as well as the early edit experiments of the Books.
Unlike some of their past forays into extended rhythmic flows and bedroom Stereolab keyboards, Amos and Brown here embrace the endlessly distracted, hyperactive tendencies of hyperpop, throwing open doors into new sounds and styles at the end of each bar. This is balanced by a reverie of maximalist guitar drone nested in a few key stretches of shoegaze bliss. However, Water from Your Eyes are at their very best when, as on “Playing Classics,” the focus is on Brown’s monotone stream-consciousness vocals meandering through Amos’s musical labyrinth, like a blasé Theseus looking to challenge the Minotaur to a rap battle.
Similar to so much modern media, It’s a Beautiful Place has a hit-and-run quality to it, resulting in the slightly uneasy feeling that we haven’t had enough to time to quite lock in on its wavelength before it blasts back off to its galaxy of origin. Perhaps that is a feature rather than a bug, though; extending an exploration of meaninglessness from a zoomed-out celestial perspective can quickly become wallowing, and that is one ’90s trend that Water from Your Eyes have wisely decided to pass over.
