Sweeping Promise - You Say I Romanticize
Album review - vote 6.6
Lawrence, Kansas isn’t exactly rock’n’roll country, but that’s sort of the point with these two. Schnug and Mondal have been glued together since 2008, some college in Arkansas, dragged their gear through Boston and Austin before Covid spat them out in Kansas with a house and a studio bolted onto it. Eighteen months to get this record out, half of which Schnug spent knuckle-deep in somebody else’s album instead of his own, and you can hear it, the record fighting for the gaps it got.
Gralla’s finally on drums for real, not just for the tour, and you hear the difference in the first ten seconds. This isn’t a two-piece pretending to sound bigger than it is anymore. It’s a band, actual drums shoving everything forward whether the rest of them like it or not.
Shooting Shadows kicks the record off and doesn't wait for anyone. Bassline out front, doing most of the damage, Mondal somewhere up top screaming like it's still 1979 and Joy Division never happened yet. No intro, no nothing, just straight in.
Sound-wise it’s a bar fight across decades. Sleater-Kinney in the way guitar and bass grab each other by the collar, Hüsker Dü in the blood, how fast the loud parts land. Sonic Youth once things get properly filthy. Go back further and there’s X-Ray Spex too, Poly Styrene’s lungs going up in flames, opera-style, except kept on a leash the way Blondie and Devo always kept things on a leash. All that chaos wired to a very tight skeleton underneath.
Cocoon started as filler, written years back to pad out a set when the pair only had ten songs to their name. Dragged around for years, taken apart and rebuilt a dozen times in that Kansas studio, and what’s left on the record is stripped to the bone, mean about it. Best three minutes here, not close.
Last Man is Mary Shelley put through a blender, if you know your books. My Anchoress goes back further still, some fifteenth-century woman who had herself bricked into a wall on purpose and never asked to come out. Nobody stops to explain any of it. You catch the reference or you don’t, and the band couldn’t care less either way.
Write Lightly closes it out, three chords stacked up while Mondal’s voice keeps climbing until she’s basically singing over her own band instead of with it. That’s where the title comes from, a line about a writer’s voice getting filed down to nothing so it can sound “professional.” Right way to end a record made entirely of people who refuse to behave.
Sags a bit in the middle, six and seven blur together, too many obsessives stacked too close. Doesn’t matter much. This thing’s got teeth start to finish and no interest in not using them.