Excessive Window: Benighted & Delighted
(The Aftershocks)
DL | Streaming
Out there now
Benighted & Delighted, the debut album from Excessive Window, trades in extraordinarily assured, nuanced, and private songs, massive on roaring guitars and hovering choruses.
Excessive Window’s debut album, Benighted & Delighted, has been a very long time coming.
You could possibly say Keith Dixon has been working in the direction of it his entire life.
From the age of 5, the New Yorker started enjoying the musical devices thrust upon him by his dad and mom. “On the time I kinda hated it, it felt like work,” he remembers.
Rising up within the ’80s, a musical little one enveloped by the MTV period, he fell in love with bands like The Jesus And Mary Chain and The Treatment. The sound of roaring guitars notably appealed. “It makes the hair get up on my arms if you get that good harmonic shriek,” he says at present.
By the point he reached his 20s, Dixon realised all that training on all that gear from his dad and mom had paid off. He may play each instrument in a band: drums, rhythm guitar, lead guitar, keyboards, and bass. When a good friend instructed him about multi-track recording, he purchased a four-track Tascam and started educating himself to file and engineer. That was the mid-90s.
The Covid pandemic proved to be the ultimate step. Throughout lockdown Dixon put that very same childhood concentrate on honing his Logic Professional X expertise. Benighted & Delighted is the outcome.
“It’s fairly humbling to see how a lot the digital instruments have made attainable for me — with out them I’d by no means have been in a position to make this album.”
And what an album it’s. In fact that beloved harmonic guitar shriek is current and accounted for. So is the affect of the Reid brothers and Robert Smith. However this isn’t nostalgia. This isn’t pastiche. With Excessive Window, Dixon has used acquainted parts typically related to shoegaze — the gauzy vocals, the wash of guitars, the six-string bass as lead, the refined however important piano-style keyboards — and crafted 9 extraordinarily assured, nuanced, and private songs.
On The Far Aspect Of A Shiny Line opens the gathering, balancing mild and shade, with a jangly guitar riff that underpins the brooding verses, earlier than a wonderful wall of vocals alerts a hovering refrain with these roaring guitars. Present single Simply The Similar initially appears understated, regardless of some impressed call-and-response vocals, but additionally transforms right into a refrain as anthemic as it’s memorable. There’s even room for a decent guitar solo and a suitably dreamy choir of voices (all Dixon, after all) that contribute to a darkish, however not miserable, temper.
Album spotlight Thresher Park — full with handclaps, deceptively easy keyboard motif, and a very stunning vocal — trades in brightness and immediacy. The ebb and circulate of Your Sort Of Blue provides an exhilarating guitar solo and fairly swathe of backing vocals to the combo, whereas the thought of, understated Endurance Recreation — twisty guitars delicately intertwined with keys — is the closest Benighted & Delighted involves a ballad. The direct, driving Fly Stroll Crawl, in flip, is the closest Benighted & Delighted involves an all-out rock tune.
The alternately frenetic and atmospheric You By no means Will Ask Why initially teems with anxiousness earlier than discovering some peace and, in the end, buying an actual sense of urgency. And album nearer Hope Is Heavy rises and falls in quantity and depth because it steadily builds in the direction of a fittingly visceral solo that wouldn’t appear misplaced on The Treatment’s Pornography album. Musically probably the most nuanced songs right here, full with an earlier guitar solo that’s all about texture, it highlights Dixon’s consideration to sonic element. Mastered by Andy “Hippy” Baldwin at Metropolis Studios, it is a actual headphone album that reveals extra of itself with every hear.
That’s equally true of the vocals; regardless of their typically ethereal sound, Dixon’s undoubtedly not attempting to cover naff lyrics. “There’s a number of looking for dignity in failures in my lyrics,” he reveals. “I’m on this stage of life the place I’m seeing that a number of life is about failing however not giving up. Even should you by no means succeed, there’s a number of dignity and pleasure within the try itself.”
So, should you’re prepared to take the time (or learn the lyrics on the band’s web site) there are traces like this to find: “I used to hurt my well being with my inhibitions, I used to interrupt my coronary heart by myself situations, I used to fill my time with unused needs, Now I’m late with traces in new auditions.”
Dixon’s taken a very long time to get to Benighted & Delighted, but it surely’s been definitely worth the wait.
Purchase/hear right here.
You will discover Excessive Window on their web site.
~
Phrases by Nils van der Linden. You may go to his writer profile for Louder Than Battle right here. He tweets as @nilsvdlinden and his web site is www.nilsvanderlinden.com.
