Seeding the clouds

Right off the bat, Whitesand/Badlands are a band that I'm going to get along with [ideologically]. Their debut double-LP is limited to 250 copies at a cool $20 (post paid), which immediately sends a couple of messages: first and foremost, they care about music as an art, and two, obviously put out a product they have to be proud of, because pressing vinyl - especially independently - does not come cheap or easy. You can also download this at high quality in a pay-what-you-can set-up where that 'what-you-can' becomes discounted from the price of the vinyl, should you choose to buy the physical record after loving it digitally. Which you will.

Like I said, putting out vinyl independently shows both dedication and pride in a piece of music, and Seeding the Clouds is such a fantastic piece that certainly deserves proper release like that. It brilliantly straddles genres or outright draws-and-quarters them as it sees fit, taking an overarching, dense shoegaze aesthetic and drenching it in beautiful natural reverb, ably throwing in vaguely post-rock complexities and elsewhere taking a kitchen-sink approach, like the heavy, doomy break towards the end of "Whale Song".

What really makes this album special is its albumness, it's natural flow and unified feel as an album, which is becoming an increasingly rare art form. Moreover, its an incredibly nuanced set of songs; you remember how your first spin of Loveless went, don't you? It's very much like that: at first, it's a one-dimensional blur of a daydream but one that begins to open up if its given proper attention, when the ghostly male/female vocals begin to coalesce and the riffs really begin to emerge through the vast space of this record and begin to sort of make a bit of sense (but not too much, not enough sense to lose it's spectral appeal).

So if you're going to come looking for choruses and climaxes and things all-together obvious then yeah, look somewhere else. You're not one of the 250 people this album was made for. But if you're the sort of person who is going to put into an album as much thought as the artists did, then you'll be plenty satisfied when the end of "Witch Hunting" pokes its head through the smoke or when "Brandspeakeasy" lures you in with its almost-nonsensically murky opening and then pulls your farther than you thought it ever could.



Whitesand/Badlands - Brandspeakeasy

Download/buy the album here.