winterpills by rick baker

A Week With Winterpills' "The Light Divides": Day 2

18 April 2007
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Tony Conte // Illustration by Rick Baker

The lake has dried up for the winter. If it hadn’t, you’d be walking across a mile-wide sheet of ice with bubbled water six inches below, eyeballing the bottom of your sneakers. As it is, wind spins the dust into tiny tornados. The lip of the lake-bed whistles as the wind cupped up under it screams and dies. Realize that you are wandering this wasteland because Winterpills has led you here.

“Tell everyone where I am, but hide me,” they say.

“You could make me feel so good if you’d come here and cry,” they say.

Often it’s the oohs and aaahhs of either Philip Price or Flora Reed (who share vocal duties on the album) that rise up as warm waves under a steady muted bass drum and complement one another. One vocalist takes the foreground, and the other is the wind beneath the eaves, the subdued howl of air reminding you just how cold it can be outside. One vocalist, the reliable shadow to the other vocalist’s gossamer wing of a voice. I’ve said it before, and the truth remains: Flora plays Garfunkel to Philip’s Simon.

This may be the best album that Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young never released. The Turtles are on the phone: they want their harmonies back.

But still…what are the Winterpills saying?

More than once throughout the album, they are clearly standing on the beach, watching some half-naked woman roll around in the sand and pretending to be Chris Isaak playing his wicked, wicked games. Best evidence? Track #5, “Shameful”. An electric guitar effected like the treble end of the tide rushing in, the vocals again holding hands, with Miss Flora in tow.

“Pilloried in crushed mint killing with a push pin/Sand in eyes vaulted in the deep rain salted.” Hmmm.

Flora’s voice is the fabric which catches the breeze, but for the most part, hangs in the dry air like fresh sheets pinned to a clothes line. And yes, the music is still beautiful.

Day 2, however, provides nothing new in the way of cracking this album’s code.

“The puzzle never solved behind the scrim of our resolve.”

If you can wait for it…I’ll do the research for you. I’m just that kind of guy.

Merriam-Webster here I come.

If you stare too directly at a star, you cannot see it for the sunspots hidden in clear sight, for the blind spots you’d burned into your eye the day your parents warned you to never look directly at the sun, and you simply couldn’t resist. Want to see that star? Look indirectly at it, focus just to the side of it and it comes back into clear sight. “The light divides” can be enjoyed in all of its simplicity if you just don’t focus too hard on it.

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