Lewsberg - In Your Hands

Some four-five months after its release, the vinyl pressing of Lewsberg's third album is here, which has the very opposite effect of feeling after the fact, instead a timely reminder of their slowly unfurling charms. Given its delay in reaching us, it's coincidental but entirely appropriate that In Your Hands should be the Dutch four-pieces most subtle and softly arranged collection to date. The pace has slowed, the propensity for gently observed profundity has increased. They still sound quite a bit like The Velvet Underground, but remember, there's more than one Velvet Underground, and here we have a new Lewsberg of sorts. They pluck more than chug, they speak as much as sing, and what they say often suggests towards some previously hidden truth in the banal and every day. The arrangements are mostly minimal - molasses guitars, violin, a three piece drum kit - but they're charged with their own micro-dramas and acuity, late period Smog sans the Americana, kind of epigrammatic but almost google-pure, too. And though there's some other key aesthetic differences, in this regard they do call to mind Cindy's soft-tongued, sharp-eyed slo-core observationals, whereby you feel you're receiving some concise wisdom even if it's more feeling than meaning. That's a hard trick to pull. Lewsberg have shifted a little on In Your Hands, but they continue to pull that one trick very well. "I'm not afraid to stop, i can just go on forever". Please do.