Description
In 2024 Guests put out their first LP and among other things, I described it as “music for people who love music but also hate it too.” I was trying to get at the care and experience that went into making the songs, but also the disappointment and exasperation that went into them. There’s a sense of taking something apart, of making it bend the wrong way, of painting it the wrong color. Like music could be so great! It could do so much! Why are we settling? Make it do something else!
Whatever dissatisfaction haunted the 1st Guests LP, it’s been shed in advance of their 2nd. This is a band that’s gone past breaking something and is fully in the “make it do something else” phase. Patient, doleful melodies—picture a cartoon tuba, bulging eyes and wheezing lungs, tumbling down a staircase. Studio fuckery, the kind of echo abstraction that might be called dub but in the same way that the Raincoats thought they were a reggae band? Deeply unintuitive drum programming. And then these riveting monologues delivered in a careful, trenchant voice. Look we all love Moss Icon but spoken vocals can wear out quick: see “And Dream of Sheep” or “F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E.” But Jessica Higgins, remember, is an attentive listener, someone with a keen demand for so much more. The organization of words and sounds is compelling, the stories and their crooked wisdoms better through repetition. The more I play this record the more I understand its scale of accumulation. The layering of sound and voice mirrored in the layering of stress and discovery, layered again in the careful unfolding of an approach to the world, of placing oneself in the world.
Released 2026 by World of Echo
Black vinyl, edition of 350 copies
