West Virginia White vinyl

The Americarnal. Midwestern existentialism. Sonic surrealism. Suburban ennui turned up all the way. Flora and fauna undisturbed For Tyler Travis (guitar, vocals), Caeleigh Featherstone (keyboards, vocals), John C. Fisher (bass) and Tayler Beck (drums) these things are real. Ohio boredom and isolation breeds certain tones in the music of WV White that shakes bones and melts away the conceptual precepts of what a rock band should be and sound like. Travis pounds riffs with a slack-jawed awe, Featherstone gilds them with bubbling organ drones, and the battery dances their own spartan jig around it all.

Evolution is not usually spoken when describing a debut, but WV White have certainly evolved from a scrappy clubhouse of blotto jam sessions to a band that now sounds completely comfortable in their own skin. Distortion and noise still carry them through - check out the American shoegaze of "The Mess", or the almost-punk-yet-buoyant "Multiple Bathrooms" - but they've also become sleek and elegant. Pianos twinkle and harmonies creep out of the once-prevalent cacophony on such clear-headed rambles as "Cockroaches" and "Mastercraft", the latter speaking as trademark to the band's signature blend of orchestrated, psychedelic pop and roots rock where the roots have decayed, frayed and re-grown.

Imagine the bombast of My Bloody Valentine shoehorned into the intimacy of Smog and Bright Eyes, or the '90s slacker anthems of Pavement and Built to Spill realized by a truant, codeine-fed version of Hawkwind. The band crafts oblong jams tethered to the pop song and pop songs that migrate to the near cosmos. It's youth concentrated on a space well beyond their years and the echoes of a nostalgic suburban existence with the drama, trials, tribulations, and mixtapes, not yet forgotten.