Some bands would call this an EP. That would be stupid, of course, but a more sheepish bunch might use the short tracklist as a hedge. Shallowater, on the other hand, are rightly presenting these six songs as their next grand statement.
Not that God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars is especially short. This trio’s music sprawls like its West Texas homeland, “where the flowers grow brittle.” Each song is a desolate landscape, parched and ready to be set ablaze when lightning inevitably flashes across the horizon. Whereas Shallowater’s fellow Texans and sometimes tour-mates Teethe play a lush version of slowcore bursting with color and life, you can practically see the tumbleweeds drifting through this album.
Despite the Texas of it all, there’s a lot of Midwest in Shallowater’s blend of slowcore, post-hardcore, and country. The music can evoke Jason Molina’s solemn confessionals one moment, Hum’s all-consuming walls of distortion the next. The NYC slowcore pioneers Codeine obviously loom large. Really, a whole roadmap’s worth of artfully askew American genius is refracted back here, from the rumbling rhythmic undercurrent of Slint to the slow-burn immolation of Greet Death to the string-bending Southern rock onslaught of Wednesday and MJ Lenderman…