Effective noire settings and a Tom Verlaine-like screech open listeners to The Waeve as they troop towards their second release. What City Lights had in lights which pierced the soul, You Saw is a shock turn from the duo. Graham Coxon and Rose Elinor Dougall had marked their self-titled debut as a degenerative shock to the system. Atrophy and jazz fusion marked a powerhouse creation, one of the best listens you could possibly get your hands on. You Saw drifts away from these darker pockets for the sake of artistic invention and pulls it off with certain grace. All those themes are still present but a much-needed and exciting instrumental change is on hand. Dougall takes centre stage and picks up vocal duties on a stylish new endeavour from one of today’s most striking collaborations.
Juxtapositions found within You Saw settle well. Giving in to love and reducing the darkness feels like a nice continuation of the sounds heard on their first album. The duo is not set to rest on those death rattles and instead hopes to look for clearer skies while retaining their slick, moody image. It works. Blurring the line between those fundamental genre standings and a new style is risky, but all great art is born from risk. The Waeve is no exception and the burst of sound on You Saw is a welcome one. Repetition is the best tool The Waeve has for this song. Its saxophone additions from Coxon and the session musicians are a neat bed of quality for Dougall to bounce through. Her vocal additions here are exceptional, a continuation of the quality set by the debut work. This is the high bar The Waeve must maintain.
City Lights and You Saw have had no trouble in making sure this fine form is maintained. Getting out of the darkness never sounded so good. Guided by some expectedly slick work from Coxon, the emotional bursts and repetition which made the highs of the first album so enjoyable are found once more by Dougall. Those moments of blurring the “out of the darkness” hopes are a real joy to listen to. Once again, The Waeve has cracked the art rock fundamentals and added their sprinkle of quality to it. As a companion piece to City Lights, the contrast is effective and exciting. An intensity rides through both songs but with compelling disparity between the two. Coxon stars on their lead single while Dougall pieces together the follow-up track You Saw. What a pairing this remains.
Ultimately the work rate of The Waeve should surprise us. The constant drip feed of releases between the announcement of their first work to now feels like a short while yet they have been trooping through for years. The Waeve to City Lights is a two-year gap yet in this time much has happened for the duo, and their consistent releases and appearances in the public eye is a sharp tool, as is their latest single, You Saw. They have conjured the same always out-there experience as The Last Dinner Party, whose connection to fans with live releases to fill the gaps between new releases is a grand way of combatting the sickly waters of streaming services. More power to those artists with a solidity to their presence, because for bands like The Waeve, the consistencies of their quality remains impressive.
