Review: Water Damage ‘2 Songs’
I unfailingly enjoy the thrill of the Shaman’s latest list of delectables for review dropping into my inbox, rummaging through it, heading to Bandcamp and YouTube for a quick shufti when the blurb piques my interest. I’m always intrigued when an artist releases two or more works concurrently, as happened with Water Damage’s Repeater and 2 Songs (Hmm, is there an Ian McKaye homage going on here?).
Like the contrary old git I am, I listened to 2 Songs rather than Repeater, purely because it was listed second in the Shaman’s roll call of promos. Gods forbid that I should do anything as predictable or rational as listen to the primary release when there’s something else from the band on offer. As it goes, I did give Repeater a spin a couple of times, but 2 Songs won out in the competition to be lauded by Green’s Purple Prose.
2 Songs is massive, I mean it’s HUUUUUGE. We’ve got two drummers, two bassists and (checks notes) ‘tons of vibrating strings’, some bowed. Hell, there’s even a glockenspiel in there (possibly). There are ten people in Water Damage all told, and the sound they make bears this out.
Coming in at a perfect eighteen minutes and fifty-four seconds (I like ‘em long!), the first song on the album, Fuck This: Reel 11 is a cosmic soup of abrasive multi-layered drone, the parts of which phase in and out of the listener’s aural consciousness. There’s such a vast amount going on in what sounds, at first, like a very simple space, that it’s difficult to understand what you’re hearing before it changes. Yet it sounds the same. Indeed, although I can’t find it again, I’m sure Water Damage’s motto is ‘Maximum repetition, minimal change’ or something similar.
a cosmic soup of abrasive multi-layered drone…
The two drummers within the set up gives the listener a sense of a driving motion throughout both Fuck This: Reel 11 and the second track Fuck That: Reel 13, enhanced by the tight looseness both drummers seem imbued with, locking everything into an irresistible groove. Yet there’s also space within the drums. It’s weird, because at times the whole sound is suffocatingly thick, so much so that it feels as though the listener could fall back into it and be held up, supported off the floor.
One of the things I love about drone in all its forms is that it can feel quite ritualistic to listen to. One doesn’t just throw on a bit of drone whilst cleaning the toilet. No, one sits, or even lies down, and immerses oneself in the vibration. Add in rhythm and drone slips easily into the realm of trance. 2 Songs has this in spades, the unchanging beat of each song, tempo perfectly pitched to carry the listener along in the experience with no sense of urgency, only relentlessness.
Fuck That: Reel 13 is punctuated throughout the middle fifteen minutes by a pinging (guitar? electric piano?) that changes neither pitch, tempo, duration or timbre. This acts as a kind of benign water torture, drip, drip, dripping away in the brain of the listener, bringing them back to an unvarying place, a marker at which they can get their bearings before diving back into the swirling madness that toward its end at twenty-one minutes and twenty five seconds, becomes all-encompassing and engulfing.
2 Songs is rewarding on a few levels. On the one hand, I can put it on, give in to it, and totally let myself be pulled along by and into the maelstrom of drone soupiness. This is trance, ritualised listening, almost atavistic in guiding modern man to rediscover the power of sound to create different states. However, there is so much to hear in the layers of both tracks as the music is just as rewarding to those who pin back their ears and take a mental note of what is going on.
This was in my top three records of 2024. Once again, that promo list has turned me on to something new and awesome.
Label: Cardinal Fuzz | 12XU
Band Links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
Scribed by: George Green
