Austin, Texas, is about to receive the most promissory bands and acts from today at SXSW and obviously, the city has a word to tell about this. Many talents are appearing there and one of those cases is Löwin, a quartet that explores Sara Houser’s vocals and indie-pop sonorities mixed with rough guitars and extra elements like brass and bells, sounding like yesterbands with a twist of novelty.
But that wasn’t always like this, their debut album “While Royal Jelly” was more rock-ish as the frontwoman and singer-songwriter played frenetically her guitar. In “Heavy As The Sun” she decided to return to her keyboard with the intention of giving a shimmery and dreamy ambient to the songs. She nailed it: the 8-piece record is full of great indie-pop tracks, from the energetic and highly addicted Sake, bringing us back to the late 00’s pop-ish acts like Givers, Friendly Fires or Ladyhawke, to the dreamy and summery Sloop, extremely uplifting and melancholic at the same time just like Best Coast, for instance, and even to Not Your Champ, probably the most futuristic composition of the whole album.
One of the most notorious characteristics of the band is the way they can be immensely captivating and addicting, every single song of their second album is rhythmically and melodically catchy, even though they’re all different from each other Sara has the touch of Midas for catchy music. While listening to the album like a short marathon we could notice so many influences that are too difficult to name them all, and that’s what makes “Heavy As The Sun” so great and impossible to get bored of.
The album closes with Burn For You and the quartet does probably the best job here. Not demoting the other seven songs, but the way this last song was constructed and directed, building-up to raw guitars and intense drums, no one could’ve imagined that the sweetest song, in the beginning, would come to this rock solo in the end. The song is structured and the melody is smooth, reminding a bit of renewed-St.Vincent and sometimes the HAIM sisters. But the surprise factor suddenly appears and the soft pop mixes with the electrifying rock where Houser sounds now like Sharon Van Etten.
Sara House, Chris DeGeorge, Michael David Sanders, Nathan Ribner are Löwin. In other words, they are the ones trying to reinvent and redefine pop-rock music with a touch of indie sonorities. And we’re sure you’ll hear about them very often after this record.
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