Everyday Balloons

Much like the album before it, Everyday Balloons sketches a couple’s demise in warm, soft-spoken strokes. Vocalists Sarah Winchester and Aaron Gerber sing their songs like sedate stage performers, often trading off lines or addressing each other directly. There are others in the band, of course, and their splashes of piano and acoustic guitar help create the album’s atmospheric backdrop. When instrumentation is as simple as this, though, the focus is all about the foreground, leaving the co-ed vocals and lyrics to keep the ship afloat. A Weather may seem deadset on depressing its listeners, yet there’s a certain degree of ingenuity in the way the band sustains its melancholy over the course of 51 minutes, and Gerber’s lyrics continue to find new ways of expressing heartbreak. “You smell like old clothes I used to know but haven’t worn in awhile,” he sings during the second track. Elsewhere, he remembers his departed lover after stumbling across her bobby pins on his bedroom floor, and “Seven Blankets” finds him comparing his failed relationship to a pair of lips (“We’re stuck like we were glued/A yawn, we split in two”). The melodies are whispered atop casual, homespun beats, making Everyday Balloons sound like a breakup album on painkillers. The ache is always there, but it’s surrounded by a gauzy sense of warmth — and it’s easy to forget about the pain unless you’re consciously poking around for it. – Andrew Leahey