Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff
The cover of Warper’s record Something, Sometime shows sparks flying off a wire in front of soft brightly-colored shapes. One of the shapes might be a finger, the other is anyone’s guess; it’s unclear if the lit object is a fuse or sparkler, impending destruction or a brief glow. The image makes a neat visual metaphor for the record as a whole: it’s shrouded in mystery, but something is clearly combusting.
Self-described as “downer shoegaze” for their gloomy disposition, Colorado-based shoegaze outfit Warper has been releasing singles and EPs since 2020. With their debut LP Something, Sometime out this month on Candlepin Records, Warper establishes themselves as an undeniable presence in the shoegaze scene. Something, Sometime has the characteristic layered instrumentation and guitar distortion of shoegaze, but also incorporates elements of slowcore (“Blame”) and alternative rock (the chugging baseline of “Pull”), and is at times reminiscent of emo or dream pop. This creates songs that sound at once familiar and obscured; “Forever,” a highlight of the album, sort of sounds like a Third Eye Blind single played through a swampy, overgrown aquarium.
Songwriter Jack McManaman’s voice adorns every track, with his silky vocals an easy counterbalance to the sometimes angular, sometimes distorted guitars. Melancholy and romantic, the lyrics explore the complexities and anxieties of love and self-knowledge: uncertainty, tenderness, resentment, anguish. At times the lyrics bend towards surrealism: “Lift me like a hammer and send me out on a tether,” McManaman sings on “Pull.” On “Forever,” he murmurs, “squeeze the blood from the stone,” sounding like he’s reciting an incantation.
Midway through the album is a quick shift to more contemplative, softer songs: the confused tenderness of “Either End,” the frustrated intimacy of “Blame.” The record ends with the sprawling, nearly eight-minute long epic “Something to Be Learned from a Rainstorm,” a cryptic meditation that balances the cosmic and the deeply intimate, mixing lyrics like “Dread reveals an honesty / That I can’t hold the love I want to” and “Am I good enough / To witness heaven as I want to see it?” Psychedelic and sincere, it makes for a dynamic, compelling closer.
The robust and crunchy guitars on “Dreaming Real,” the chromatic, almost atonal runs that open “Jinx,” the ferocious “Shapes in the Low Light”—Something, Sometime is an explosive jumble of sounds and themes, but Warper pulls it off. They have created a formidable debut record, and cemented themselves as a band to watch.
Disappointing / Average/ Good / Great / Phenomenal
Something, Sometime is out now via Candlepin.
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Elizabeth Piasecki Phelan | @onefellswoop
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