‘Ruins’ is a lush, expansive release that uses the siblings’ uncanny blood harmony to full effect, elevating their low-key folk songs into something majestic. Like The Staves, Haim and classic rockers Heart before them, something happens when these sisters sing together that defies the boundaries of mere Radio 2-friendly pop. It’s the kind of searing sound that makes your heart leap out of your chest and on the jaunty ‘It’s A Shame’ and haunting ‘Fireworks’ it sounds more powerful than ever before.
On her second album as Air Waves, Nicole Schneit jettisons some of the twang that marked her 2010 debut, opting for urban chug over playful Americana. And though she brings on collaborators like Lower Dens’ Jana Hunter and Ava Luna’s Felicia Douglass, she winds up streamlining her sound instead of expanding it.
A former Haunted Graffiti member, Gary War (aka Greg Dalton) often gets shortsighted alongside his peers, Ariel Pink and John Maus. Arguably, the most experimental of that crowd, War tends to resist the nostalgic impulse in Pink’s music and precludes the pop chops of Maus. On Jared’s Lot, this sensibility is accentuated even further than in the past. Here, he hides razor-sharp angularity under a fog of reverb and contorts a melody’s crooked gait into an impenetrable Fibonacci sequence of retro-futurist arpeggio bedlam.
