I have been waiting for Will Kraus' new music since his 2018's brilliant album Path. The Texas-based artist is someone who delivers one of the loudest and heaviest shoegaze-like experience these times. He showed it before and really nothing has changed, with his new album View No Country being as loud and as beautiful as the ones before.
His idea for the music is simple: the guitar has to be loud, the vocals extremely dispersed and subtle. It works like charm. The compositions are very short, they certainly have this punk-like vibes all over: short and rapid, leaving impression on the audience and quickly go further, to the next song. The guitar sounds are very loud, but they have also this blackgaze's synth-like layer of smoothness that make them sound crushingly heavy but also extremely attractive, creating mesmerizing soundscapes that are only subtly distracted by vocals. Those are extremely dispersed, to the point that it feels almost wrong to hide singing so deep into the audio. You just listen to Expect/Deserve and can't help but feel for the barely present beautiful vocals. But that's the point, that makes Kraus' music so special; perhaps there's more into this too, perhaps it's all about the fact that beauty is very subtle and difficult to appreciate - not only in his music.
I love the way Kraus combines two very different approaches to music: the loud and rapid blitzkrieg of sound and the extremely airy and melancholic music genre. His works could easily be called punk shoegaze but to fully appreciate that, they have to be listened to as loud as possible.
View No Country costs 7 USD.
Check: Glass Valley
Country: Texas, US
Genre: punk shoegaze
Label: Terrible Records
