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Winterpills
By Matthew Despres
Photo by Henning Ohlenbusch
On the same March afternoon that Winterpills were in hazy Austin, Texas, stamping an exclamation point on the end of a successful SXSW run, a foot of snow was quietly falling on the Northampton, Massachusetts band’s hometown. Roads were shut down, tempers fell short and shopping lines ran long, but down South, despite the bit of frigid North that had packed itself in singer Philip Price’s bag, the show was still going on.
“I’m sitting in our hotel in sunny Austin nursing a motherfuck of a cold,” wrote Price that night on the band’s website. “This is year two in a row where I was felled with some affliction upon arriving here. Why does this occur? Last year, it was an impacted tooth — this year, the cold I should have had in January. No doubt I would trade the tooth for the cold, but come on, there are tacos to be eaten that I now can’t taste, and gigs to be played that I might be croaking through.”
For Price, who cast off other pursuits in 1992 to focus on music full-time, it will take something stronger than a late winter chill or irritable tooth to stray from the course that has brought national press, radio and celebrated author Jonathan Lethem to stand up and trumpet Winterpills’ sound. There also seems to be little that could disrupt the formidable and often underestimated talent around him, a band made twice as rich by doubling as a troupe of kindred spirits. With partner Flora Reed’s feathery vocals, Dennis Crommett’s guitar and Dave Hower and Jose Ayerve on drums and bass respectively, Winterpills’ new album, The Light Divides, sounds every bit the organic project the group insists it is.
The evidence is in the harmonies. When Price and Reed engage on the same level, as they do on “Hide Me,” where Reed’s voice stunningly serves as both the melody and chorus, it is one of the rare moments in music when things go remarkably right. For the songs on The Light Divides, Reed is the muse, the missing piece.
The album is an intimate effort full of bits that push and complete each other. It’s neither confrontational nor passive. Far beyond the spit-shine production is a band comfortable in its own voice and confident enough to tug at the seams of others.
On one of its handful of online incarnations, the group describes itself as “Four weeks of rain, two days of sun, and the voice of someone you thought you had lost forever.” That summation is true in a pleasantly happy-just-to-be-here sort of way. And it trumps every flattering, but ultimately empty allusion to Elliott Smith or Simon and Garfunkel that comes to the band in spades.
Winterpills, flush now in that post-release glow, are in the enviable position of sitting at the fore of the community that once fostered them; Northampton houses a fiercely supportive artistic culture. The music on The Light Divides pops with the authority of that experience. On “A Ransom,” one of many unassumingly ambitious tracks, Price sings, “This is what you will wear at the end of the world.” It’s a smart moment of contradiction that speaks to the whole: While Winterpills haven’t rewritten the pop book, at least it rests in capable hands — a humble blessing for those who still love a good guitar and even better voice.