Farmer’s Wife

As the renaissance of '90s shoegaze continues, Austin’s Farmer’s Wife tread moodily around its boundaries. Combining elements of dirge, psych, scatterings of '80s pop and heavy doses of grunge, their music recalls the best of that era – the early records from Smashing Pumpkins, Tool, Jane’s Addiction, and Slowdive.

Singer and guitarist Molly Masson’s voice is beguilingly wistful, delivering lyrics that blend art-house horror with fantastical romance, cocooned in a fairytale nightfall. Musically, drummer Jaelyn Valero and bassist Jacob Masson match that unease with brooding rhythm, and guitarists Jude Hill and Derek Ivy alternate lush melodies with walls of tension and gloom. The overall effect is intricate and unnerving, the feeling of sitting in peaceful sunlight with a dark forest of untold terrors surrounding you. These off-kilter dreams are perfectly captured on songs such as “Shoe Goo” and “Swarm” or the beautiful melancholy of “Pool Song.”

Their new EP, Faint Illusions, takes things to a grittier place musically, but with the same familiar themes winding throughout the songs. Decomposing, fading, withering – imagery blending gothic finality with romantic despair. “Tangled up in silk again. Cover me in your mildew….The fruit it rots and falls onto me,” sings Molly on “Mildew,” once again turning decay into ardor.

Repeatedly, the band weaves the most delicate lyrical webs through a storm of instrumental lament. “Walking down the sunset, stars are in the street. One pocket full of posies, one pocket full of meat,” sets the ghoulish tone for “The Ballet” - a song that starts in whimsical twilight before spiraling into a fever dream of night and chaos. The final track, “Discount Roses” sees a simple tale of falling in love swallowed by metaphors of alien abduction and a nod to a paradise of the afterlife – coming full circle on the arc of love’s birth and death.

As with all their music, the allegories blend into the storytelling, which is sometimes intensely personal and at others wholly voyeuristic. That push-pull of intimacy and distance is central to both their recordings and live show, leaving you constantly off-balance but always enraptured.