Last autumn, we wrote about absent, just dust, an album from Gabriel Brenner’s Pastel released on Very Jazzed. The record was centred around the difficulty in communicating after great loss, finding words inadequate in the process of grieving and moving on. This week sees Very Jazzed put out another release, a self-titled EP by Two Meters, and while Floridian Tyler Costolo is writing about a different set of circumstances and situations, there is a similar attempt at using intense and atmospheric sounds to convey trauma and grief.
However, while Pastel opted for a sprawling ambient sound, Two Meters has at least one foot in the bedroom pop camp. Though with the help of Brenner’s production, Costolo maintains a rich and fierce instrumental edge too. As such, Two Meters achieves what at first appears a paradoxical hybrid, blending the sincere intimacy of bedroom pop with the urgent weight of ambient into what are either condensed epics or impossibly rich snapshots. Dimestore Saints, who premiered the first single, put it nicely, describing how Costolo manages to “hon[e] sentiments of loss and sorrow into a precise vessel,” vacuum-packing too-large emotions into a single EP.
As the title suggests, ‘Left Behind’ opens with a headlong charge into the themes of the record, charting the aftermath of a bereavement. The track is sedate for the first half, though a lingering hum suggests some residual energy, the air still vibrating from the recent violence. This sparks back into full-bodied emotion by the midway point, and in doing so conjures the cycle of the grieving process, anaesthetised stretches interspersed with sudden drops, where everything becomes too vivid and fast-moving.
‘Captive Audience’ is less abrupt, building slowly with simmering tension before the monolithic white noise garble of ‘Current Sequel’ tries to swamp Costolo’s words. From here, ‘Trapped Inside’ clears the air, though in a fashion strangely ethereal, as though peace can only come in dreams, before ‘Web’ follows with warm yet morose pleading. The track could be seen as the first waking moments after the lightness of ‘Trapped Inside’, a desperate desire to go back into the dream or time itself, or else just share words once more with a person who needs to hear them.
We’re delighted to be able to share a full stream of the EP a few days early, especially as the album is one that deserves to be listened to as a complete whole.
Artwork by Maya Tripathi