Music with this much reverb and this many tape delays is often called dream pop, but there's something painfully awake about the debut from singer Tamaryn and producer/collaborator Rex John Shelverton. Their brand of star-crossed, guitar-driven haze gets so dark, so plaintive, so heartbreaking, that it couldn't possibly belong to any kind of dream.

Tamaryn's subject matter tends toward the tragic: lost loves, suicides, empty spaces, seasons ending. The title track is less a tribute to the ocean than a vast, sky- and soul-searching meditation on death, complete with gothy poetics and fuzzy guitars. "Out of the rivers, the seaports," Tamaryn sings, wraith-like, in the album's most haunting moment, "Wait for the water to claim you / the sea returning into the waves."

The Waves easily could have waxed melodramatic, but the album ebbs at exactly the right points: buoyant on "Sandstone," dense and restless on "Mild Confusion." Tamaryn has said she's "interested in duality" — sad songs with a note of happiness, or lonely songs with some hope. And while you can't read much optimism into a song like "The Choirs of Winter," there is a certain loveliness in her languid, Victoria Legrand-esque vocals as she murmurs about city life and… read more »