The sparse lyrics throughout wet glass leave room for mutability. It’s a record of few words, tumbling through the dreamlike arrangements and reshaped by their melodies. Penultimate track “to trees” sounds raw and improvisational, almost unfinished. It leaves Proctor’s voice unadorned with just a meandering acoustic guitar and ambient background hum: “You belong to trees/Deep below two trees.” The single repeated line of “unsolved mystery” is at first unintelligible under a humming drone, fuzzy ticking, and softly rumbling keys until it floats to the surface like a message in a bottle at the track’s conclusion: “You’ve got it now,” Proctor sings, perhaps a reference to one of Verity Den’s biggest influences, Yo La Tengo. You can hear the Hoboken band’s DNA in the dusky opener “vacant lot,” with its storm of distortion; and in the title track that follows, its thick, flinty guitar riffs feel like a fleece blanket and the hissing and clanging of a radiator on a winter morning. Both comforting and tense, it weaves pop melodies into a loose, spiraling jam that could probably sustain itself for twice the song’s runtime given a particularly raucous live rendition.
Compared to the sleepier strains of dream-pop and shoegaze, Verity Den let their lucid dreams run rampant. Their best hooks glint through the fog of sinuous, loud-and-quiet chord progressions, shaking up extended jams even if just for a shining moment. Bright basslines and tinny drums on “spit red” push against Wallace’s whisper-shouted wallflower observations about “barn-sour” horses and his ambivalence toward the party he’s attending, as he ponders the alienating effects of life on the road. “I hear something breaking off in the distance,” he remarks. “Maybe it’s just thunder.” “green drag” is the record’s brightest spot, a piece of ride-into-the-sunset jangle-pop. “Nothing but laughter from the stands,” Wallace promises in his victory-speech verses while Proctor’s voice flits through hazy, honeyed choruses. wet glass’s meandering is what makes its compact moments of certainty so glorious. Even when you don’t know where their jamming will lead, it’s more than enough to be along for the ride.
