VERITY DEN IX XVI MMMXV LP (Three Lobed)

If you’re reading this in time, Verity Den plays tonight at the Brillobox in Pittsburgh, on the 16th at Jerry’s on Front in Philly, and closing out the 17th at Bandito’s in Richmond. GO.

The pride of late-era American shoegaze peels back some curtain and returns to zero, finding their atmosphere immediately with these sidelong live instrumentals (one a new improvisation, the others sections around a mammoth, heavy, bottomed-out take on “Everyone Thought You Were Dead” off their debut).

Underneath the soft haze of their first one and the grinning smear of last year’s Wet Glass is a band that plays out and lands in their tender spot almost immediately, speaking to some qualities I wouldn’t fully understand until I had the chance to see them live. Far be it from me to do some sort of internet 1.1 “word cloud” around this experience, because it wouldn’t help much, but I didn’t want to come in with an expectation outside of what their records did to me in their respective periods of release. Now I can confirm – their demeanor is businesslike, vertical and tall as the Piedmont pines, and maximalism doesn’t play a role in their sound so much as the methodology behind it.

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