Windy & Carl: You Can't Hide Your Love Forever Volume 7
Geographic North
Who doesn't love Windy (Weber) & Carl (Hultgren)? The Dearborn-based couple have been issuing wonderful guitar-based drift for years (their first release appeared in 1993), and their latest, a seven-inch pressed on blue vinyl (300 copies available), is no less delectable, even if it's only two tracks long.
And how can you not love the single when its “North” side is a cover of Dwight Yoakam's “A Thousand Miles from Nowhere,” and a lovely one at that, too. In this wistful exercise in heartbreak and entrancement, Windy's soft voices floats o'er a dense bed of acoustic guitar strums and pealing electric figures, with all of it bathed in a sea of reverb and dreamy atmosphere. As one might expect, the “South” side's “Geographic” gives us a brief sampling of the duo's trademark sound, in this case a dusty ambient-drone whose electric guitars smolder in slow motion against a shimmering mirage of hallucinatory haze. In another context, the piece could waver in the air for a half hour or so, but the single format forces them to keep it short. No matter: after digesting this little beauty, listeners hungry for Windy & Carl's long-form opuses need only turn to kranky full-lengths like 2012's We Will Always Be (for the nineteen-minute “Fainting in the Presence of the Lord”) or 2008's Songs for the Broken Hearted to address that need.July-August 2012