Sussing - Weekend Athlete
On their debut EP, Weekend Athlete embrace emptiness with understated and well-crafted alternative rock.
Much of Weekend Athlete’s debut EP Sussing occupies spaces of emptiness. These are not empty songs—they are occupied by father figures, lovers, friends, overdriven guitars. But they breathe emptiness into existence: singer Amanda Hagenbuch’s airy voice and dreamy guitars float atop strutting drumbeats and squirming synths, filling the balloon of Sussing with an aura more than any tangible substance. The characters that occupy Sussing are translucent images—mirages of the people whom they may have once described. These apparitions are powerful, transient entities that come and go as they please, rarely stopping to inspect the profound impact they may have had on their surroundings.
Rather than fighting against this emptiness, Weekend Athlete embrace it wholly, letting it wash over and color their every hesitant and powerful note. Hagenbuch’s subtly arresting vocal performances seem to emanate from the corners of an enormous room, ostensibly unconcerned with whether or not anyone may listen. From Sussing’s opening notes, Weekend Athlete wrestle with the conflict between desiring to address their surroundings on their own terms and knowing that an empty world is not an easy one to live in.
Opener “Father Figure” allows its mantra of “you try,” purred meditatively by Hagenbuch, to wash over a bed of synths that sound like smooth pebbles feel, until a guitar line reminiscent of Eddie Van Halen on horse tranquilizers threatens to disrupt the tidepool’s tranquil surface. The song then evolves into a call-and-answer between keys and guitars, a conversation no longer allowed between the singer and the song’s titular “man worth loving.” Eventually the pebbles form waves of their own, crashing down over the song’s somehow-timorous arena rock drumbeat in the absence of Hagenbuch’s haunting presence.
The EP’s five songs revolve around simple guitar lines, unfolding into full-band orchestrations only after each song has established its presence. This format showcases harmonics on “Tic” and anchors “Learned Behavior” with a DIIV-esque riff later joined by another meandering guitar line. As “Lose Your Mind” depicts a scene in which the speaker is drowned out by the screams and confrontations of her lover, so too is her voice buried by an understated yet powerful guitar line that purposefully slides between two chords. “28” opens with “Be My Baby” drums shrunk down to a microscopic scale, eventually topping them with a distant, discordant riff—surf guitar beamed in from a planet without waves.
Although Sussing often treads on well-worn ground—the grunge-indebted loud-soft-loud of “Lose Your Mind”; chillwave’s signature reverb on “Father Figure”; the way “Learned Behavior” unfurls in archetypal slowcore fashion—the pervading emptiness of these songs penetrates deeper than any of these individual influences. The songs on Sussing often play out in expectable but rewarding ways, tweaking familiar themes and structures all in service of creating an impressively isolated world.
Weekend Athlete might achieve this purpose most clearly on “Tic,” where the line “Winter’s coat may come and cover me right up” pours out in the strained swaying and swelling of Hagenbuch’s voice and a cavernous synth threatens to swallow the entire band. “Tic,” like much of Sussing, doesn’t attempt to reinvent the wheel, nor does it reshape the landscape of alternative rock in 2019. None of this is a problem, though—when Hagenbuch declares, “you all have left me for dead” on closer “Learned Behavior,” it is impossible not to be wrapped up in the emptiness they feel.