Whitney - Light Upon the Lake

Whitney are barely a year old, since Max Kakacek (ex-Smith Westerns) and Julien Ehrlich (ex-Unknown Mortal Orchestra) joined forces, but it’s as if they’ve been bottling up the spirit of ‘Light Upon the Lake’ for over a decade.

Out it pours; these songs about missteps, misled youth and forgotten nights. At their best - Max’s guitar lines going full-throttle, Julien’s soulful falsetto never missing a beat - Whitney are exceptionally smart at capturing a feeling that’s hard to contain. They could document every second of someone’s teenage years into a forty-minute record, if they put their minds to it.

Julien tends to deliver simple phrases - about how he’s “sleeping alone,” how he spends days and nights where he “can’t be found” - but almost everything he sings is about loneliness. It’s a hard-to-pin emotion that many can’t convey, but he’s a pro. ‘Golden Days’, a song about being worlds apart from the person who should mean everything, is a heartbreaker like no other. Opener ‘No Woman’ is, again, painstakingly beautiful, and the message packed inside is tough to swallow.