Some albums are best heard at night with the lights off, while the day’s noise is still faintly ringing in your ears. ‘Aquatic’ is one of them. Listening feels like being lowered into a lake after dark, with the surface closing overhead and your own thoughts going quiet. The record, originally released in 2010 on Reverse Reverb, now returns as a double LP, remastered by the band, pressed in a run of only 300 copies, with a bonus disc of unreleased songs from the same sessions. Some reissues are just housekeeping. This one is worth the trip back.
Highspire’s second album is built from weather and water. The guitars spiral and smear, bend deliberately out of tune, and bounce off each other like light on a pool floor. The vocals don’t sit on top of the music. They dissolve into it, sung in a murmur you’ll stop trying to decipher within a minute or so. You stop hearing words and start hearing texture, which is its strength. It’s shoegaze and dream pop the way it was made in the early nineties, with no irony and no nostalgia act. Nothing here feels preserved.
The opening pair, “just begun” and “what lies before,” set the terms gently, and neither one rushes you. They ease you in before the water gets deep. Then “satellite” lifts off at four minutes forty, and the sky seems to crack open. It circles a handful of chords rather than going anywhere, with a tender sort of loneliness, and the reverb makes it sound like a signal sent a very long way with no promise of an answer.
The long songs are where giving in becomes total. “sunraindown” runs past seven minutes and earns them, cycling through brightness and downpour like a May afternoon that keeps changing its mind. “glacier” follows at a little over six minutes, slow, huge and cold in a way that ends up comforting. It barely seems to move, but the guitars keep building until they completely surround you.
After that the album moves through shorter, quicker moods. “dusted” and “dead by dawn” raise the pulse, and the second has a faint feverish edge, a song for the hour when the party has thinned out and everyone still claims they’re staying. “all i see is blue” does what the title says, filling the frame with one color until you don’t want another. “standing on an empire” runs just under five minutes and has a swagger I didn’t expect, a grand gesture delivered in a whisper, as if everyone knew the empire was made of sand. The last stretch of the original album, “disappears,” “joke’s on you” and “fields we’ve found,” plays like a tide going out. The sadness is real, but it’s the easy kind, the end of a long day.
The bonus material comes at the end of the set, and it isn’t filler. “swallowed sunsets” and “raincloud” fit the album’s atmosphere so well, a double-take of the sleeve confirmed they weren’t on the original. “take a drive with me,” gives the extra disc its name and its warmth. It’s the most open-windowed track here, a road song for people who’d rather watch headlights smear than arrive anywhere. “brontosaurus” closes things with a lumbering, affectionate oddness, a reminder that the band had a sense of humor under all that fog. The remastering is gentle and respectful. It adds some depth without clearing out the blur that gives the record its character.
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