As one half of Brooklyn-based duo Water From Your Eyes, Nate Amos makes left-field pop that feels hypermodern: wry, memey lyricism; post-ironic genre-hopping; the kind of jilted chaos and tonal jumble that characterises a social media feed. Yet the band had actually been plugging away for seven years before their 2023 breakthrough. Amos’s solo project This Is Lorelei has been going even longer, only gaining proper traction with last year’s belated debut album Box for Buddy, Box for Star.
Now Amos is capitalising on this recent momentum with another release, this time a compilation of re-recorded songs dredged from his extensive Bandcamp back catalogue. Unlike his WFYE output, these tracks are mainly gentle folk-rock numbers that deal in honeyed melancholy. They tend to be brief and narratively vague, glancing at regret, disappointment and darkness (“you don’t want to know what my dreams are about,” he claims on But You Just Woke Me Up). His most obvious stylistic counterpart is indie-rocker Alex G, but while Amos can’t rival him for lyrical punch, he can match his knack for pleasingly diverting detail: see Name the Band’s chunky pop-punk bassline or the bright guitar twang on Dreams Away.
This Is Lorelei isn’t quite as compelling as Amos’s other project (whose spirit is detectable on outlier Mouth Man, an eclectic rush of dead-eyed sprechgesang and awkward synth blasts over a four-on-the-floor beat), but this collection of sweet-sad acoustic fare is certainly enjoyable enough to justify its opportunistic repackaging.
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