Feuleux
Shadeweaver
self-released
Darkwave has been fairly dominant club sound in Our Thing for some years now, for better and for worse. The former is best exemplified by acts like North Carolinians Feyleux, a duo whose debut 2024 LP Midnight Hearts ably walked the line between electronics and guitars, with a healthy dollop of goth rock to set the mood properly. Their new follow-up Shadeweaver is if anything a more distilled version of that familiar sound, alternately spooky, dreamy, depressive, and above all incredibly heartfelt.
A big part of Feyleux’s appeal lies in how wellthey manage their toolset, applying an effortless savvy depending on the song’s requirements. Opener “Remote Control” has the duo in their full majestic danecfloor mode, with Laurie Ruroden’s deep vocals carrying the tune while Erica Gilstrap’s guitars flip between new wave tremolo and dive bomb pick slides as the intensity of the song picks up, all kept in perfect balance with the song’s mood of longing. Alternately on “Flutter + Fade” you get an equally emotional sensibility, but built around a an intertwined guitar and synth melody on the chorus, the verses dialled back to bass and little peels of six-string to emphasize the chorus’ grandeur. The band just have a terrific grasp of what a song requires from them, which means when they need to dial in some mid-eighties Cure vibes for “Grave Moss” they don’t overcomplicate it, using the vocals and some lush reverbs and delays to compliment the elegantly simple arrangement.
That said, the band do throw some well-executed and welcome curveballs into the proceedings. The high-gothic haunted house mixtape intro of “Astral Weaver” wouldn’t normally suit a song so dreamy, but ends up bringing out some of its more cool and ghostyly textures with ease. “Oubliette” just simmers for so much of its runtime, with a number of tiny breakdowns that delay the eventual drum breakout that only serves the song’s hopelessness. And while it’s not unknown for the band to throw out some big hooks on occasion, the massive anthem album-closer “Strawberry Moon” is as perfect a big club number as they’ve ever written, strident and wistful, propulsive and electronic and damnably catchy from the first listen. Like all the material on Shadeweaver it sounds like the work of a band who have their sound dialed in, but aren’t afraid to take some big swings. The effort would be laudable even if it didn’t have such effecting results, the fact that it all comes across so consistently and sincerely is genuinely remarkable, and makes it one of the best genre albums of the year. Recommended.
