After the depressive, relatively minimalist sounds on their previous album, 2011's In and Out of Youth and Lightness, Louisville dark-rock three-piece Young Widows could have gone one of two directions: softer or louder. Thankfully, it's the latter. In fact, fourth album Easy Pain is arguably the band's heaviest yet. Pummelling forward with the subtlety of a Kentucky swamp man, Easy Pain's eight lengthy, groove-laden tracks embrace vocalist/guitarist Evan Patterson's fascination with aural destruction.
Ignoring the confines of heavy music to reassemble a different form of loud, throbbing rock, tracks like "Kerosene Girl," inspired by the drum beat to an old soul song, are a whole different beast than Patterson has unearthed before. The whole album is built of walls of sound, which Louisville producer Kevin Ratterman (Coliseum, Rodan) rattles and shakes, low end rumbling and high end peaking way past red. In the past, Young Widows have resembled a less punk, goth-y version of Patterson's brother Ryan's band, Coliseum, but on Easy Pain they have created the kind of album that could be put in the same lineage as Joy Division, Discharge and Neurosis. Simple yet lofty comparisons are one thing: instinctive, primal, destructive tendencies are quite another.
Read our interview with Patterson here.
(Temporary Residence)Ignoring the confines of heavy music to reassemble a different form of loud, throbbing rock, tracks like "Kerosene Girl," inspired by the drum beat to an old soul song, are a whole different beast than Patterson has unearthed before. The whole album is built of walls of sound, which Louisville producer Kevin Ratterman (Coliseum, Rodan) rattles and shakes, low end rumbling and high end peaking way past red. In the past, Young Widows have resembled a less punk, goth-y version of Patterson's brother Ryan's band, Coliseum, but on Easy Pain they have created the kind of album that could be put in the same lineage as Joy Division, Discharge and Neurosis. Simple yet lofty comparisons are one thing: instinctive, primal, destructive tendencies are quite another.
Read our interview with Patterson here.