ROSES (CHERRY RED ECO MIX VINYL)

An album called 'Roses" would be concerned with romantic gestures. Across the ten
tracks that make up the seventh and newest Widowspeak record, intimate spaces
and stages of love are captured with a nostalgic, 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 being too 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. 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.