An album called “Roses”wouldbe concerned with romantic gestures. Across the ten tracks that make upthe seventh and newest Widowspeak record, intimate spaces and stages of love are captured with anostalgic, vaseline-coated lens. Candles burn inside red glass as lovers get close ina leather booth.Celebrity headshots gaze down like angels in a restaurant. Elsewhere, carnations are pressed in a blackbook and dancers pull each other close. Widowspeak is a band that riffs on big emotions without beingtoo self-serious. The sweetness, even silliness, of an extended limerent phase that becomes as all-consuming as a pulpytrade paperback. Cars and their drivers serve as a way to talk aboutcodependency. And old love gets worn in, soft as an old t-shirt. If music can simultaneously benaturalistic and noir, saturated and lush, that is Widowspeak. They’re a band that knows how to set ascene.These songs use intimate moments to talk about deeper heartaches: the restlessness inherent in modernexistence, waiting around for something tohappen. Or, feeling at odds with playing a role in your own life.“Roses” might be the most romantic Widowspeak record, but it’s also the most deeply realist: the stage isset not with dramatic overtures but the backdrop of the minutiae and repetition ofdaily acts. Smallobservations before, during, and after work: the ritual of pouring water for customers, catching a cold onyour day off. Daydreaming about winning the lottery, or maybe realizing you already won. Here, love is away to talk about whatdrives us, and Widowspeak suggest it can be the whole point. The light thatilluminates the dark corners of a day, a life. A reason to keep going despite the pain it can cause. As thetitle track goes:Not all thorns will prick you, you still feel thefirst. And now you don’t grow roses becausethe one still hurts... I want to be the one.Widowspeak are one of the most prolific and hardworking bands going, bubbling just under the surface.Molly Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas are the core of the group and its songwriters, and they havehoned their sound across sixteen years and an impressively consistent catalog. A lot has happened inthat time: for them, for everyone. One of many bands to crop up in a fertile New York City music scene,they started outshuffling gear between venues now-since shuttered (Glasslands, Cake Shop, 285 Kent,Death By Audio to name a few) and their practice space in Monster Island Basement (now a TraderJoe’s). The highs and lows of a long career mean chaotic stints as road dogs traipsing across NorthAmerica, fly-in gigs to São Paulo or Guadalajara, wrapping seven-week European tours... And thendown-time of years in between, considering the power of slowly building a body of work. Widowspeak isnow a married couple, working dayjobs in their own off-season. Robert is a carpenter, Molly a waitress.Maybe time has given Widowspeak the ability to grow slowly; “Roses” is unpruned and more beautiful forit; left a little wild as it stretches its new growth in all directions. Fromthe opening chords of “The Hook”you can hear how far they’ve come: the road is open, the sky clears. The band feels at ease, and takingtheir time. They recorded the album last January at the Old Carpet Factory on the Greek island Hydra: astudio in an old house tucked into the village’s steep hills. It’s quiet there in winter, when the tourists haveall gone home. Longtime touring members Willy Muse, John Andrews, and Noah Bond serve here as theplayers. “Roses” was then taken home and slowly, lightlytinkered with, before being deftly mixed by AlexFarrar at Drop of Sun Studios, and mastered by Greg Obis at Chicago Mastering.“Roses” is Widowspeak at its best, drawing on forever influences. There’s dream and power pop, a littleStones, maybe some Petty, open and languid ballads with the twang of a Lynchian roadhouse band...Perhaps you hear REM, Yo La Tengo or Cat Power. A little Neil Young in Hamilton’s references toworking at the diner. The magic of the band is, still and always, the interplay between Molly and Robert intheir two leading roles: her languid, textured voice and his visceral guitar playing. And as producer,Robert captures the ephemeral magic of a band finding a song in the studio: something that still bears traces of the directness of Molly’s voice memos and the dense guitar tapestries of the demos. The rough-hewn marks of the tools are still evident, the noise kept in.“Can’t hold too tight or I’ll have nothing, Like a candy melts in your hand.”As the album closer“Hourglass” contemplates the fleeting nature of something, anything, it illustrates what is most true aboutWidowspeak. At the heart of it, their music is special because it is real: most of all for the people makingit. Fragile and temporary, and worthwhile... like love itself.