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Them Are Us Too Make Amends

      The Bay Area’s euphoric dream pop duo Them Are Us Too began in 2012 with schoolmates Kennedy Ashlyn and Cash Askew playing well balanced eighties inspired synth-pop shoegaze. In 2015, they released their debut album, Remain, a gloomy tour de force to incredible acclaim. They built up a dedicated cult following, and that success hyped the anticipation for the follow-up to their big debut. Tragically in 2016, a warehouse fire claimed Askew’s life at 22 years old, putting the band’s career in uncertainty. However, through the ashes of tragedy arose a new album, Amends, the band’s second and final as TAUT (as fans call them) and it is a beautifully haunting piece of work filled with ethereal elegance and atmospherics.

     Amends, as Ashlyn describes, is “a collection of songs that would have been the second Them Are Us Too record, an amendment to our catalog cut short, a final gift to family, friends, and fans.” Amends is a celebration of the magic and art that Ashlyn and Askew have been making since the band’s formation. While it is bittersweet for TAUT to leave us prematurely, Amends says so much in such a brief amount of time. It drives home the nervous energy of acceptance and unrestrained expectations in the face of loss. It is what remains of incomplete demo recordings that Ashlyn stitched together with the help of producer Josh Eustis, her partner Anya Dross and Askew’s stepfather, Sunny Haire (he lengthens Askew’s previously recorded guitars) to full realization. Eustis also lost a creative partner (Charlie Cooper) far too early and that only adds to Amends‘s pathos. Throughout the album’s six songs, the fabric of grief is intimately explored and Ashlyn projects it powerfully. It is a moving experience from start to finish awash with hallucinatory ambience and dream-state hazes that stay with you long after you’ve put your earphones away. It is a timeless classic of grand heights in league with Disintegration-era The Cure and early Cocteau Twins. Where Remain was dark and dreary, Amends is a release of sadness. Its songs highlight the various processes of sorrow. It is therapeutic and highly deserving of a careful, open-hearted listen. It is a permanent goodbye to what once was. This final farewell wonderfully makes sense of the struggles of loss with lyrical sentiments perfectly encapsulating the shaking realization of death. It is an intriguing, triumphant, defiant, eternal and thought-provoking piece of art.
 

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