Travis Austin is Water Damage. George Dishner is Water Damage. Danielle Hills is Water Damage. Thor Harris is Water Damage. Jonathan Horne is Water Damage. Nate Cross is Water Damage. Mari Maurice is Water Damage. Mike Kanin is Water Damage. Greg Piwonka is Water Damage. Jeff Piwonka is Water Damage. This time around, Wendy Eisenberg and Ricardo Dias Gomes are Water Damage, too. Authoring the introduction to Repair – the band’s exceptional new album – David Grubbs is also Water Damage. Hell, you are Water Damage.
Where am I going with this? Well, here’s the thing: Water Damage are beyond a band and an institution. They are a way of life.
Repair is another crusade during a decade where one could rightfully consider as Water Damage’s alone. The Austin, TX renegades, ruling the experimental landscape with five full-length releases in as many years. Each, your favourite Water Damage album at some point during any given day. It’s the ultimate barometer for your favourite bands and, frankly, a year without new music from Water Damage wouldn’t be a year. It’d just be a void underneath the one in which we currently live.
So… to Repair. Yes, it’s another rumbling affair that continues to see Water Damage shed new skins and create new dimensions. Starting with Reel 45, which, from its opening bars, sees the collective marauding across the vast lands like never before.
Water Damage - RepairWhile previously welcoming you back into their zone of magnetic liberation, Reel 45 is all sweat, spit and sawdust. The dual drumming of Hills and Harris (or is it Greg Piwonka? The band’s constant flitting between roles and disciplines, hard to keep up with) is like never before. Reel 45 swells, whines and gallops, picking up pace to the point where Water Damage move at lightning speed. Keller and Maurice’s collision of strings, akin to twisted metal scraping across a guard-rail. It’s an eruption of noise and colour that forms as rustic, screaming-skull kraut-rock on uppers. It’s also one of the most beautiful moments Water Damage have etched to tape.
Such as the bolt rumbling, unhinged nature of it, while the protracted mind-fuckery of the band’s mediation on The Stooges classic, Down on the Street maintains the speed (with some added Reel 43 flavour, of course), preceding it, Reel 38 finds the band dialling it down down. By Water Damage standards, it’s cerebral, however it’s this contrast that illuminates their dynamism. Every member, locked in and feeling their way through the briars in something that completely untangles the mind knots.
And following the pummelling treatment they give to Osterberg, Alexander and the Asheton brothers’ Down on the Street, that worn-into-the-groove acid blues residue leaks into Reel 41. At times it feels like a fever dream of Hendrix wrestling Can; during others, like a road that leads to Loop’s Heaven’s End. In truth, it’s something that completely cleans out the ears, which again, underlines Water Damage’s shape-shifting mantra.
The closer you listener, the more evident that Reel 41 feels like a band reaching the core of what they are setting out to do. This brand of hypno-blues catharsis, embodying everything from Greg Piwonka’s unique artwork to the captivating sound itself. It’s all a part of the story, feeding into the way of life that Water Damage is. A way of life that grows even stronger with an album like Repair in it.
Repair is out now via 12XU. Purchase from Bandcamp.
