Review

Windy & Carl

We Will Always Be

Kranky • 2012

Windy Weber and Carl Hultgren have not only been making music together for twenty years in a band bearing their names. No, they actually love each other, and their love is – even if not always the cause – always the subject of their music. Windy plays bass and Carl plays the guitar. Sometimes, Windy even sings. But in the end, it can all be summarized with these few lines: »I love music to no end, and I love to hear Carl play the guitar more than just about anything else in this world. I play to hear him play.« And Carl would probably say the very same about Windy, which is what the music’s aura by the two record-stores-owners from Dearborn, Michigan, is all about. The two talk to each other, listen to each other, embrace each other, dance, and never interrupt one another. While other great lovers in pop-history (Serge & Jane, Sid & Nancy, Kurt & Courtney) were all drawn to the impulsive, the passion, Windy & Carl are all about endless harmony. The drones circuit and ensnare each other softly, like in the 18-minutes-finale Fainting In The Presence Of The Lord. The guitars approach one another and approximate tonally to the respective opposite, as can be heard in the record’s highlight Nature of Memory. This track could remind the listener of Sonic Youth, only that it’s played endlessly slower. And since last year’s break-up of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore (both of Sonic Youth), Windy Weber and Carl Hultgren might be the very last hope granted to love in the name of rock-music. Not even the folk-failure, For Rosa, the opener of We will always be, could change that.

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