Water & Bodies - Light Year
Record Label: Rain City Records
Release Date: February 22, 2011
Who?
Water & Bodies are three-quarters of Kaddisfly: Optimistic, ‘90’s alt-rock wielding dreamers who sing in the key of positive. It’s kind of shocking, to an extent, to hear Christopher Ruff wail about carrying on “a legacy of hope and love” because it’s so rare to hear this kind of spirituality professed by non-religious artists in today’s scene. Yet here we are with Light Year, an album that’s full of it.
How is it?
Musically, Light Year is fickle. I won’t be the first one to point out that Water & Bodies’ alt-rock swag only sometimes works here. They start off strong, rattling off 4 engaging rockers; “Free World’s” soar is easy to get caught up in, and “Moments in a Life’s” start/stop guitars make it a head-bobber. But then the album hits “Echoes,” a mostly inelegant song with a decent chorus, and leaks some momentum. From there on out, Light Year is hit-or-miss. It’s fine – fun, even – when it powers ahead in “1980” and “Lonely Night,” but really crawls when it tries to slow things down (“The Return,” “Written and Read” and “Already Gone”). At times like these, Ruff’s vocals tend to translate as a bit over-dramatic, which is not a good match with the still-developing songwriting.
It’s still exciting to hear lyrics telling us that “we’ve got to live before we die” coming from an album like this though. I don’t like to use the cliché “refreshing” to describe music because, well, it’s a cliché, but it seems that I don’t have much of a choice here: For all the life sucks-isms that permeate throughout today’s rock culture, Water & Bodies are really something refreshing. They don’t have it all figured out sonically on this album, but they do enough to make me want to stick with them as they mature.
I htink you hit the nail on the head with a lot of these ratings. It's an awesome album, but it's simplicity doesn't lend to a high lasting value. It's the little hidden intricacies in Kaddisfly that make listening to those albums today as good as it was a "Light Year" ago.
After loving Kaddisfly and really liking the first W&B EPs, I was kind of dissappointed with this album on the initial listen. However, it has grown on me after hearing it a couple of times. I also disagree with the reviewer, I think they're at their best on the slower tracks, "Already Gone" and "Written & Read" are, in my opinion, some of the high points of this LP (I absolutely hated Lonely Night since they released it as the first single).
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