New Drowner album out today

If you only buy one new release today, make it You’re Beautiful, I Forgive You by Drowner.

It was just a few months ago when I wrote about the Houston dreampop/shoegaze band Drowner and their incredible noisy, dreamy slow burn “Never Go Away” (2012, from the Drowner EP). You might wonder how a release that has ten songs and clocks in at over 53 minutes can be called an EP. The deal with that is that Saint Marie Records cobbled a bunch of stuff together to compile the release. Drowner consists of all the tracks from a previously self-released EP, the tracks from a 7″ single, and a couple of remixes. It’s a very good record, and I highly recommend that you buy a copy of it, using the link above.

The band’s new album, which is technically their first album, dropped today, and it’s available from Saint Marie Records here. As far as physical copies go, this one is only on CD. Get your digital copy from the Saint Marie bandcamp page here, or from any of the legal downloading places.

You can stream the whole album over at The Big Takeover, but you can hear one of the album’s stronger tracks right here:

“Stay With Me” by Drowner

I love that it starts off with a bit of a post-punk feel. A little gloomy and bass-y. Just ever so slightly reminiscent of the intro to “Fascination Street”. By about 1:12, it gets a bit more dreamy/shoegaze-y, and it stays that way.

Like a lot of the songs on the album, it’s sort of hard to make out the lyrics, but there’s multiple references throughout the album to some sort of secret romantic relationship. There’s also multiple references to public transportation and to how much little time they have together. I didn’t really think about it too much until a friend suggested the “affair” theme to me. After hearing her take on it, I went back and listened again, and I sort of get it.

There’s something that bothers me a little bit about the production, and something specifically about the way the drums were mixed and/or recorded. Getting beyond those minor things, I really like this album, and I highly recommend it.

The standout tracks, I think, are “Metro”, “Stay With Me”, and “Our Last Day”