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WIDOWSPEAK
An album called “Roses” would be concerned with romantic gestures. Across the ten tracks that make upthe seventh and newest Widowspeak record, intimate spaces and stages of love are captured with anostalgic, vaseline-coated lens. Candles burn inside red glass as lovers get close in a leather booth. Celebrity headshots gaze down like angels in a restaurant. Elsewhere, carnations are pressed in a black book and dancers pull each other close. Widowspeak is a band that riffs on big emotions without beingtoo self-serious. The sweetness, even silliness, of an extended limerent phase that becomes as all-consuming as a pulpy trade paperback. Cars and their drivers serve as a way to talk about codependency. And old love gets worn in, soft as an old tshirt. If music can simultaneously be naturalistic and noir, saturated and lush, that is Widowspeak. They’re a band that knows how to set a scene.
These songs use intimate moments to talk about deeper heartaches: the restlessness inherent in modern existence, waiting around for something tohappen. Or, feeling at odds with playing a role in your own life. “Roses” might be the most romantic Widowspeak record, but it’s also the most deeply realist: the stage is set not with dramatic overtures but the backdrop of the minutiae and repetition of daily acts. Small observations before, during, and after work: the ritual of pouring water for customers, catching a cold on your day off. Daydreaming about winning the lottery, or maybe realizing you already won. Here, love is away to talk about what drives us, and Widowspeak suggest it can be the whole point. The light that illuminates the dark corners of a day, a life. A reason to keep going despite the pain it can cause. As thetitle track goes:Not all thorns will prick you, you still feel the first. And now you don’t grow roses because the one still hurts… I want to be the one.
THOMAS DOLLBAUM
The realest-deal storyteller in indie-rock today is the Tampa-born, New Orleans based singer/songwriter Thomas Dollbaum, and Birds of Paradise is his most powerful and dynamic work yet. Following up his critically acclaimed Wellswood (Big Legal Mess, 2022) and Drive All Night EP (Dear Life Records, 2025), Birds of Paradise is a goodbye letter to lost loved ones and former selves. These songs find Dollbaum searching for acceptance in the transient in-between places: Florida’s pine flatwoods, backroads leading to 1-95, where birds fly across the water. And even though the ghosts of his alt-county predecessors Townes and Molina are definitely present, on Birds of Paradise, Dollbaum emerges from their shadows waving to the past, sounding all the more like himself.