The word “nostalgic” gets thrown around a lot when describing indie rock music, but I defy you not to think about your ex or your childhood cul-de-sac amid the dreamy lushness of a Way Away song, especially the pair of home-recorded tunes they released last Friday — “This Is Just to Say” and “Weirdo Rippers.”
It’s not so much the lyrics, spare and often effected beyond easy intelligibility, that are responsible for the wistfulness. Instead, it’s the Little Rock quartet’s bright, reverb-saturated sound, which is somehow both spry and languid, hopeful and yet burdened by the pull of the past. Thread Processing
A couple highlights from the fresh singles: Halfway through “This Is Just to Say,” two stick clicks signal the arrival of a new tempo, only slightly slower than the original pace, but offering a significant shift in mood that bands with less subtlety wouldn’t be able to pull off. Also, although Way Away is decidedly a chill project, glorious fuzz can be found all over the appropriately-titled “Weirdo Rippers,” so don’t write them off as background music.
Formed by Thom Asewicz, Jonathan Jacobs, Jeff Killingsworth and Lee Petray in 2017, Way Away has been a steady presence in the Central Arkansas scene for several years now, but they’ve shared only a small amount of recorded music, the last of which was 2019’s “Sometimes,” a five-song EP produced by Mark Colbert at Capitol View Studio.
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