Review Summary: Constellations of grief.
Little Weight is perhaps the closest 40 Watt Sun has ever been to exuding any real sense of warmth. The bittersweet love and loneliness in which Patrick Walker exists may have had a thread of commonality in which to find comfort, but it never felt quite so direct that he was ever just trying to give the listeners a big fat hug. That is to say that this is the most approachable 40 Watt Sun have ever been in spite of all the languid tinctures that stain the glass we look through, as if to showcase that the haze will soon withdraw even has not yet. “Pour Your Love” introduces through IMMENSE reverb drawn across surprisingly jubilant chord progressions this concept. I say surprisingly because of how glacially paced the riffs actually
are, with most variance or inflection coming in the form of Walker’s weighty croons.
With this notion in mind, it is at the core of each song's initial tone that a semblance of variety is created. Each 40 Watt Sun song is often this mournful, immutable piece, with differentiating balances of joy and dread and anxiety being initiated the -moment- you hear the first note. “Half a World Away” is, aside from
Perfect Light, the most airy and spacious that the band has ever been, stripping away nearly all reverb until the tracks closing sequence, making for a more dainty and precious but slightly happier affair. While every track still emits a great sense of longing, this hits a notable peak in “Astoria”, with vocal melodies that crackle and waver like a wind breaking against the endless oceans tide. If “Half a World Away” is a rather piteous pinnacle of joy, then “Astoria” is it reeling back into desire and confusion, flailing desperately for love that has been buried.
The final track “The Undivided Truth”, while the longest and mayhaps most trudging track, is an unequivocal balance of love's bittersweet honesty that are the heart of Walker’s ideals. The guitar tone is dull and dismal but with bits of acoustic brightness that creep towards the latter half, with the vocals maintaining a similar flow of unmoving dismality until a feeble strength is revived from the ashes. It is a song that struggles against the weight of its own mourning, and yet there is always a new horizon somewhere within its grasp. This is one of the big motifs of the band itself-this idea of love as a great human necessity, something upon which our minds orbit and carries with it all the wildest highs and lows we may ever experience. It becomes easy, then, to live in its shadow, always longing for the brief hours or minutes of ecstasy that can be tailed by months of obsessive grief. This is why
Little Weight is so consoling. It’s an exhibition of that desire and fixation at its lowest points, but with glimpses into an existence where those wild highs can finally exist in rollicking hills of more manageable peaks and valleys rather than the destructive tendencies we may live in right now.
“And standing on the Fulton riverside
All of my life seemed to me like the lights out on the water;
Lonely notes of clarity
But didn’t they shine?”
