This summer sees the return of Widowspeak, the recording project of Molly Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas, with new album Plum on Captured Tracks. The title of the record proves pertinent, alluding to the way the band play with form and function to craft songs both hospitable and challenging. The sound harks back to the warmth of 2015’s All Yours, wide, wistful arrangements for the listener to linger inside, but this soft sweet flesh encases harder truths. Dig deeper into Plum and you will find its seed, the unpalatable centre around which everything else is arranged, the very thing that stops you from chewing gaily in mindless comfort.
With a warm and ethereal sound that belies the cutting tone of the lyrics, latest single ‘Money’ is a stellar example of this style. The track homes in on society’s ability to rationalise the destruction of its own environment, delivered with a self-awareness which sees Hamilton’s dreamy vocals mimic the individualist’s remove from systemic issues. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the things we tell ourselves in order to ‘forget’ the toll of our collective actions,” Hamilton explains. “Whatever makes it easier to forgive what we’re complicit in. Some of that is related to the environment and how people have trained themselves to tune out ‘environmentalist propaganda.'”
The song’s video is dialed into this too. Widowspeak play the song on a sunny day in the park, but the rendition is interspersed by vintage film of nature in varying degrees of health. “The archival footage is mostly pulled from films aimed at employees or shareholders of various industries,” Hamilton says. “The narration for many of them (forestry, agriculture, mining, energy) was surprisingly concerned with the dangers of an environment out of balance… [which] shows you that we haven’t learned much in the last 70 years.”
This is intrinsically linked to the value system of the political moment, where every facet of existence is judged on some scale of productivity. When the only true measure of worth is a return on the investment, then there is no space for acting with restraint or stopping to consider consequence. ‘Money’ captures this—how capitalism has coerced us all into its own encompassing logic, and justifies its own destructive forces—evoking not so much an ignorance of our own impact on the world but rather our attempts to forget it. A distracting mantra, some kind of hypnosis.
Will you get back what you put in?
It’s too late to start over again
To earn your living, it’s worth forsaking
All is forgiven and free for the takingMoney doesn’t grow on trees
Money
Plum is out via Captured Tracks on the 28th August and you can pre-order it from the Widowspeak Bandcamp page.
