Classically trained, before graduating through phases of riot grrrl and jazzy folk, Bay Area artist Asha Wells has arrived at a style all of their own. There’s all of the tender emotion and lyrical imagery of the best singer-songwriters, but with textured ambience and haunting melodies that elevate to another plane entirely. Back in March, Wells released their debut, Water Words, via Royal Oakie Records, an album that utilises this style to trace the arc of a partnership from dreamy beginnings to the new paths of the aftermath.
As if to mirror the turbulent conditions that birthed it, the record refuses to sit in one place. From the noirish folk pop of opener ‘At Night’ to the vibraphone-based closer ‘Motorbike’, Wells moves through sounds and emotions like scenes in a dream, seemingly disparate thoughts and feeling united by an uncanny common thread. An early standout is lead single ‘Mood Indigo’, which combines folky acoustic guitar with plinky vibraphone and airy vocals that soar through some pretty heavy subject matter. Crying in the closet, don’t know why I feel the way I do,” Wells sings,” hiding like the locket, hollow and blue / Performative sadness, I scream into my coats, unbearable lightness, I never really feel alone.” Like much of the album it’s dark and mysterious but with a strange lightness too, refusing to succumb simple emotions or song structures.
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Initially released as a double single back in March, the album’s centrepiece is the two track run from ‘Blue Angels’ to ‘Drugstore Perfume’. Emblematic of the album as a whole, the songs sit in the strange space at the heart of any new relationship. The period where nothing is decided in any one direction, the potential of both promise and regret latent within every detail. As we described in a preview, ‘Blue Angels’ “marbles intimacy and hesitance into its tender tones, like an open palm wanting to grasp what is before it, though wary of the thorns hidden out of view,” while ‘Drugstore Perfume’ is a heady dreamlike glide into the uncertainty of the unknown.
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Water Word‘s personal nature is perhaps best captured on the soft and swaying ‘Up In a Cloud’. An exploration of Wells’s experience of supporting their partner through spells of disassociation, it directly references the song ‘Chimacum Rain’ by 70s folk singer Linda Perhacs which they would sing to their loved one when things were at their worst.
You’re spacing out, up in a cloud, I find you
Thinking out loud, what’s that about
I can’t get through to you
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Water Words is out now via Royal Oakie Records and available from the Asha Wells Bandcamp page.
