#two ribbons

This may be a record partly about mourning and dislocation, and one that doesn’t hesitate to acknowledge the more difficult parts of the situations that the duo went through (it’s simply never going to feel right to lose someone that young, even if your friendship heals and deepens you’ll never quite have that telepathic childhood closeness), but there’s far more than gloom here. The opening “Happy New Year” basks in the joy of repair, the chorus beaming “and nothing that was broken can touch how much I care for you,” while “Levitation” is the most effervescent song you’re likely to hear about disassociating on the bathroom floor. And while the increased level of compositional and sonic polish is to be expected from still-young artists getting increasingly used to their form (especially with fewer outside collaborators, this time the whole record produced by the band and David Wrench throughout) there’s still plenty of their vivid inventiveness, whether it’s the bit that gives “Insect Loop” it’s title or the way “Hall of Mirrors” evokes the way a crush can make your head swim. 

For the first time Walton and Hollingworth wrote songs separately to begin with here, although they still crisscross vocally and worked on each other’s. If Walton, with “Happy New Year” and “Hall of Mirrors,” gets some of the biggest moments, Hollingworth takes lead on some of the more devastating ones. The closing title track is a gorgeously sad reckoning with changing friendships and lost partners, one that acknowledges the pain that can’t be dismissed and the people who are still there to love. But maybe the key track here is the wrenching, soaring “Watching You Go,” a song about both the determination to live in the face of loss and the immense, consuming anger that we sometimes have to wrestle with to do so, eventually cracking the sky with guitar in order to release it. Two Ribbons is the kind of great record that you kind of wish the artists never had to make.