Water From Your Eyes: Everyone’s Crushed Album Review

Nowhere is their fatalism more overt than on the acrid post-punk closer “Buy My Product,” a mock corporate ditty about the endless production of insecurity under late capitalism. “There are no happy endings/There are only things that happen,” Brown announces. “Buy my product.” But their disquiet tends to come through more obliquely, as in the nauseated orchestral loops of “14,” where Brown repeatedly declares intent to “throw you up” but never quite achieves relief. Or the elliptical title track, where almost no matter how you scramble it, “everything hurts.” On the latter, Brown mumbles feebly like a child with a tummy ache, while the doomy, disjointed production foreshadows the arrival of something worse: The synths creep like carbon monoxide, the guitar hobbles on broken legs, and the drums incite mangled bleats as though you’re next up at the slaughterhouse.

Ultimately, it’s not the hazy discontent that makes Everyone’s Crushed indelible but its livewire sound. You can interpret the deadpan counting in “Barley” as a slog through business hours—“another long day at the not killing myself factory,” according to one meme—but the song’s erratic whirl of movement and texture evokes glass shards trapped in a tornado, intersecting with the flat, 2D stitching of Brown’s voice, the up-down scratch of shakers, and the jagged slope of a rock’n’roll guitar riff. Amos has cited color field painter Mark Rothko as inspiration, but his capricious production more directly evokes the transgressive, action-oriented approaches of other Abstract Expressionists, who staged upon the canvas “not a picture but an event.” Likewise, Water From Your Eyes are always thrusting you into the middle of a grand saga you can’t quite grasp: On “Out There,” peals of tropical-sounding synths disappear into mist, the paradise breeze interrupted by a subterranean rumble; midway through, the song screeches like hot-wired car pulling a U-turn. This is music that resists logic, that invites questions like: Where am I? What the fuck is going on?

Who knows, but let me offer another example. “True Life” opens with skronking guitar blasts in alternating tones, like construction workers wreaking havoc on opposite sides of the road. Brown struts, sunglasses on, through the chaos. “You don’t even grasp the zipper/You won’t even ask the question,” they accuse, whatever that means, while the song tumbles and thumps like an off-balance laundry machine. Then Brown begins to plead, “Neil, let me sing your song,” which the band explains in interviews with a long backstory about hoping to interpolate Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl” but not being able to get past his lawyers. It’s a highdea if I’ve ever heard one: singing a song about not singing somebody else’s song—Somebody Else’s Song also being the title of one of their past albums, not to be confused with their covers collection, Somebody Else’s Songs—and the whole thing is dizzyingly obtuse and borderline incomprehensible. But in the end who cares, because the music sounds awesome. Neil, give ’em a call.

Water From Your Eyes: Everyone’s Crushed