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First Listen: Widowspeak, 'Almanac'

Widowspeak's new album, <em>Almanac</em>, comes out Jan. 22.
Andrew Smith
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Courtesy of the artist
Widowspeak's new album, Almanac, comes out Jan. 22.

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Widowspeak is a fount of familiar sounds, from early-'90s shoegazer rock to twangily portentous Western soundtracks to the languidly soft pop of Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval. But the Brooklyn-based duo of Molly Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas fuses them all into a hazy swirl and gives them a kick of buzzy energy — and, in the process, gives the music a dreamy pop sound of its own.

The pair's second album — Almanac, out Jan. 22 — takes the spare, droning simplicity of Widowspeak's self-titled debut and fleshes it out, thickening it with added layers of guitars and organs. But Almanac isn't just a bundle of blearily impeccable atmospherics; the closer you listen, the more it snaps into a focus as a richly textured portrait of aching melancholy and momentous change.

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Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)