Through The Lupine/Sky Blue Vinyl

Description

In 2016, White Shape released the EP White Shape, enriching an already growing psychedelic movement that was quickly gaining momentum in the fertile grounds of the northern Illinois music scene. Not wanting to do or be anything within boundaries, White Shape quickly developed as a self-manifested consciousness, creating palettes of sonic awareness through their later studio albums. White Shape provided an outlet for those seeking to explore the limits of what music can do for self-transcendence. And then, as with all things, times changed. For the first time in the modern era, all of humanity was reminded that we are all equal. Equal in our capacity to feel loss and pain, but equally equal in our capacity to persevere. And in the balance of these scales, no one was spared from the things undone. There were endings, conclusions to stories whose end we did not want to see. But there were beginnings. It was the beginning of things. And more than that, there was the fearless refusal to let things disappear completely. Persist, change, transcend. White Shape would emerge from this Charybdis not unscathed, but like Ulysses, having lost a few along the way. With the departure of two founding members, Josh Weidman and Alyssa Hall once again set sail into the wind, and from the turmoil of these incomparable times, they gave birth to their latest album, Through The Lupine. This is unmistakably White Shape, with its moody atmospheres, Hall’s iconic voice floating and stretching to fill every physical space, and the classic narrative architecture that invites you into the music and, with it, to create your own inner worlds. You can hear them in every track, and especially in “Draped Urns.” But as has been said, no one came through this period unscathed. In White Shape’s quintessential sound, there is something else, something new. You can hear it on the earlier “Knives Down”; a barometric pressure shift, a sea change both deep and subtle. It is a challenge, a refusal to go quietly into that good night, but with undercurrents of something else, something not yet found in the band’s earlier work. Is it optimism? Hope? Or simply resignation to create for the sake of creating. The true value of Through The Lupine is that it gives the listener the space to create their own interpretation. For White Shape fans, there is everything you love and want. There is just more. And it is different. It has evolved. For the initiated, there is the beginning. The introduction to the next understanding of what it means to experience music.