Litvar arrived a few years back as glossy indie-rock upstarts, all synth flicker and hook-chasing ambition. *Being Here* dispenses with most of that inheritance. Gone are the vocal chops and the digital sheen; what remains is bare-knuckled and close-mic’d, a record that sounds like it was made in a room rather than assembled on a screen. That’s not a small gamble for a band who built a following on their sonic sweep, but it pays off handsomely. The songs breathe. You can hear the wood grain of the guitar.<\/p>
The album’s emotional spine is the death of Thurstan’s father, and to his enormous credit, he never turns that loss into spectacle. “I Hate It Here” opens with the last words he spoke to the man \u2014 a small, devastating promise never kept \u2014 and lets the silence around the line do the heavy lifting rather than piling on melodrama. It’s the kind of songwriting that trusts its listener, which is rarer than it ought to be.<\/p>
“What Kind of Man,” the lead single, is the record’s most immediate pleasure \u2014 a hook sturdy enough to have wandered in from a Lennon-McCartney demo session, wrapped around lyrics about waking up mid-collapse and deciding, however unsteadily, to take the wheel again. “Yeah I Know” answers it with the opposite motion, a chronicle of losing that same control during a panic attack, sung with an anthemic swagger that feels almost defiant against its own subject matter. Placed side by side, the two songs form the record’s argument in miniature: that recovery isn’t linear, that you can grab the wheel one day and lose it the next.<\/span><\/p> Elsewhere, “Backstab” slinks along on a jazz-inflected groove that feels genuinely disorienting, like waking up unsure which room you’re in, while “When You Come Home” offers a plainer kind of warmth \u2014 a love song about showing up for the people who need it, sung without a trace of irony. By the time “Leaving Seattle” closes things out, the mood has shifted from mourning toward something closer to daylight. It doesn’t resolve the grief so much as learn to carry it differently, which feels like the more honest ending.<\/span><\/p> The touchstones here \u2014 Dylan’s folk directness, Wilco’s willingness to bend a song out of shape, a faint Eno-ish shimmer at the edges \u2014 are worn openly rather than smuggled in, and Litvar have the songwriting chops to earn the comparisons rather than merely gesture at them. Drummer Joe Lemieux, guitarist Violet Falkowski and bassist John Blues McCarthy give the material room without ever crowding it, which is its own kind of discipline.<\/span><\/p> *Being Here* is a record about the long, unglamorous work of putting yourself back together, and it treats that work with the seriousness it deserves. Sad, generous, and quietly triumphant \u2014 this is Litvar’s finest hour yet.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\nhttps:\/\/www.litvar.net\/<\/a>\n\n\n\n\n
<\/span>
<\/span>