Widowspeak

If Widowspeak keep refining their sound and cranking out memorable and quietly impressive songs like they do here, they may end up being pretty special. Even if they don’t, though, this album will still be out there to help soothe and thrill you when you have a post-Mazzy itch you need to scratch.

Their excellent debut album is a neat mix of somnambulant balladry and ragged high drama.

Widowspeak's captivating singer Molly Hammilton conjures Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval but the key to this crestfallen Brooklyn trio is the guitar work. The skill with which Widowspeak assimilates its influences into alluring song structures is what prevents this from being an exercise in tributary.

Its winning, all-pleasing debut, quiet as it may be in a scene overcrowded with showiness and incessant bids to polarize, is perhaps a mere pebble dropped in a sea—but with will and wit enough to ripple as far as a boulder.

Widowspeak has created abrasive indie rock without overpowering noise, letting the vocals shine and meld with just a hint of reverb.

As of right now, Widowspeak are a perfectly enjoyable, if ultimately unexciting band.

Their debut slots into a middling no-man’s land with very few defining characteristics, positive or negative.

Beachy summer party/winter bummer wallpaper for your Bohemian café-bar and for the hipsters that frequent it.