Apocalypse takes many forms on Sigil, the second record from Sour Widows. Its songs are littered with black holes, disasters, nuclear bombs; there are guttural screams and onslaughts of distorted guitar. This brutality isn’t the Bay Area band’s only mode, but hardly a song passes on Sigil without destruction, or at least the looming threat of it.
Often, these crises follow the logic of dreams, where angels can crawl in through your ceiling, or a door can let in “all the filth from the world.” The album was conceived from a series of dreams, too: It takes its title from one that singer and guitarist Susanna Thomson had about making a record named Sigil, and the premise of its title track comes from a dream her bandmate, Maia Sinaiko, had about the end of the world.
No score yet, be the first to add.
It feels fitting that the record’s name and title track represent a kind of symbolic merging of Thomson and Sinaiko’s subconscious minds. The two artists met as teens and started the group together about a decade ago; on their early EPs and first record, their intense intimacy as friends formed the backbone of their music, manifesting in winding, interwoven guitar lines and shared singing and songwriting duties. Those releases featured slowcore-indebted indie rock, often in six- or eight-minute songs that built to towering peaks. Their second record is somewhat sleeker—no song surpasses five minutes—but packs considerable emotion into these tighter forms.
Sour Widows made Sigil with producer Melina Duterte of Jay Som, and together, they built a dense, lush backdrop for the songs’ questions of meaning and vulnerability. Strings, organ, and Mellotron float in the background of several tracks; on “Lucky Star” and “Still Warm,” ghostly guitar effects briefly fill the frame. There’s an increased sense of drive on these songs, which sometimes comes from swifter tempos and sometimes from the thoughtful additions of the band’s rhythm section: drummer Max Edelman, who has played alongside Sinaiko and Thomson for years, and bassist Bella King. The band’s knack for emotional catharsis persists: “Sigil” and “Lucky Star” climax with howled vocals over keening violin and cello; “Her Garden,” which also includes the album’s hookiest chorus, builds up to a swaggering guitar solo; the thunderous end of “White Horse” veers toward grunge and sounds like an exorcism.