What if you were so enamored of Seventies folk singer-songwriters that it inspired you to create music of your own, but all you had was a drum machine and a synthesizer and no money to splurge on a full-fledged band or fancy production? This is what Wet’s fourth album Two Lives feels like.
For instance, the album opens with “Coffee In The Morning,” which has muted pianos with a soft acoustic guitar accompaniment and front woman Kelly Zutrau singing with sage-like calmness. The whole thing has a scratchy bedroom pop appeal but evokes the blissfulness of Joni Mitchell or Carole King, even in its minute and a half duration—which, by the way, is unjustifiably short for a song that has potentially so much more to offer.
On “Shut My Eyes,” the music gets even sweeter and warmer with its brush drumming, laid-back pianos, and Zutrau’s pleasantly melancholic vocals. You are captivated and don’t want this whole Carole King effect to end…except, it does, and quite unceremoniously so, at a mere minute and a half (again); how unforgivably criminal of the band!
Wet redeem themselves on Two Lives’ best track “Soon To Be Moon,” which has a pensive beauty in its soft instrumentation and a warm string arrangement that’s achingly blissful. While the band rewards the listener’s soul in this appropriately long number, it only adds to the agonizing thought of what could have become of the others, had they been longer.
Most of Two Lives is electronic. However, Wet still maintain the intimacy of a folk record throughout. On “Double”—an album highlight that could only be considered as vaguely “exciting”—the piano is used the way it often is on dance music, played as loud notes, repetitively and percussively. Although there is a sort of towering quality to the piano notes (which even overpower the drumbeat), the song is still tender.
Two Lives has a gentle beauty with a sparse, laid-back quality, almost as if it was made in the cozy confines of a bedroom rather than in the rigid setup of a studio. But there is no denying that the production is polished in an understated way; this goes for Zutrau’s singing as well.
The intimate down-to-earth sweetness in Zutrau’s voice makes her a great folk singer. But she also uses this delicateness to do gentle gymnastics with her voice that flirts between singing and humming, making for some very fascinating vocal performances. Like on “Close Range,” another standout, Zutrau’s vocals have multiple layers, each dancing with the other, like a complex Tango that is hard to understand, but is choreographed so gracefully.
From Zutrau’s sometimes strange vocals to the deliberately economical production and the abrupt shortness of certain songs, Two Lives has a sense of quiet chaos. It is its tender folk aesthetic that calms this chaos, making it—in all its unusualness—a grounded yet elevated record.