Vesper's 'Flood Stage' Is Two Permanent Songs and One Long Wait

Vesper keeps the tracking room at 58 degrees. You can hear it in the guitars, which never quite settle in tune, and you can hear it in Marguerite Dunn's breath, which she does not edit out.

Flood Stage is eight songs, forty-one minutes, cut mostly live over four nights in the Studio with Curtis Lamb engineering. It is the best sounding record GZS has put out this year and not the best record.

Start with what works. Lamb has finally stopped gating Delia Rand's snare. It rings for most of a second on "Wet Season" and the room comes in behind it, and the song's whole architecture depends on that decay: Ellis Pratt plays a two-chord figure for ninety seconds and does nothing to it, and the reverb tail is what keeps you from checking how long you have been listening. Hoyt Gaines is miked this time instead of going straight to the board, and the bass has wood in it. On "Hush Money" he plays the root only on the downbeat and lets Pratt's tremolo fill the gap. Rand's fill at the top of that song, the one where she comes in behind the beat and then catches up in a single triplet across the floor tom, is the best drum moment on any record here in a year. It is also the only one like it. She has been playing with a taped wrist since spring and she gets through the other seven songs without reaching for it again.

"Slow Down, Beulah" is the reason to buy this. Four minutes, no reverb on the voice, just Dunn and a pump organ she plays badly and a bass that enters at 2:10 and turns the song from a dirge into a threat. She sings about a woman who will not leave a house and she never once tells you why. The second verse ends on a line about a porch light left on for nobody in particular. Pratt does not play at all until the last eight bars, and when he comes in it costs something.

The title track is eleven minutes and it should be five. Vesper has built a career on patience, and this is the first time patience stands in for an idea. The first six minutes earn themselves: the drone is in E, Gaines sits under it, Dunn's vocal is a half step off in a way that reads as deliberate. At 6:40 the band drops to a clean arpeggio and waits. That is the exact word. They wait. Nobody adds anything for a minute and forty seconds, and then the full band returns at the same volume it left at, which means the setup and the payoff are the same event. A band this good at texture should know that quiet is only worth something if the loud part is louder.

"Nine Pounds of Nothing" doubles the vocal an octave down, a crutch Dunn does not need and is too good a singer to want. "The Gate at Cheatham" is a Vesper song by the numbers, competent, cold, forgettable, and it sits in the third slot where this record can least afford a shrug. The closer, "Sisters of the Little Flood," fades out instead of ending, and on a record this deliberate a fade is a decision nobody made.

Southern goth as a category usually means a reverb pedal and some kudzu in the lyrics. Vesper is the rare band that earns the modifier. The dread is regional, the vowels are specific, and the flood in these songs is an actual river doing what rivers do. Dunn writes about weather the way people who have lost things to weather write about it, which is to say without atmosphere, as a schedule.

Buy the single. Buy the album for "Slow Down, Beulah" and "Hush Money" and program around the middle. Three stars out of five.