Spilled Into Atmosphere

Hey kid, need a lift? Like, right up off the ground? Spill into Atmosphere is the freshest whitecap in the crashing-upward wave known as Wet Hair, the Midwestern duo-cum-trio that’s been holding it down for years as a multi-stop repeat-shop-‘n-hop psych-pop pin-drop right there in the dead center of everything and/or nothing, Iowa City. The Wet Hair discography having spired itself to a respectable vantage – shared releases with such powers as Rene Hell, Naked on the Vague and Peaking Lights, both via frontmensch Shawn Reed’s Night People imprint and others – Spill into Atmosphere becomes the band’s second full-length with De Stijl. There is motion here, oh yeah – circling swirls of lighter-than-air energy, born aloft on propellers of foam yet anchored to earth with thunder-clap rhythms and Reed’s heady bellow. Spill into Atmosphere gives you that feeling you had when you finally mastered the controls on your hovercraft: You’re both in it and above it.

Augmenting the core of singist-synther Reed and drummer Ryan Garbes is Justin Tye (replacing Matt Fenner, from previous album In Vogue Spirit-era), no mere third wheel but Wet Hair’s very own sort of Peter Hook (not counting all the Judas stuff), his unique melodic signature flying in formation with the band’s but also peeling off into flights that relate to the silk wheels of the synths but compliment them, guide them, support and distort and report to them. No longer is the only way up – the only way is every way. And from this altitude, Wet Hair can hear for miles.