Told Slant - Going By

Pitchfork 74

Like other peers in the Double Double Whammy scene (Frankie Cosmos et al), Felix Walworth’s music revolves around transmuting daily ephemera into loftier symbolism. “Floating by you on ice skates/Vodka mixed in pink lemonade/So much love without high stakes,” the Epoch collective member sings on “Wappinger’s Creek,” off their second album as Told Slant. As that title suggests, the songs meander through all the rural and suburban settings central to folksy emo fare. Drinking 40s in the parking lot, sinking “Cannon Balls” into mountaintop swimming holes, and searching out “turtles by the fallen trees”—they’re the isolated, intimate spaces in which small town kids write memories of touch and togetherness.

The album begins plainly with “I Don’t,” a track title indicative of Walworth's penchant for somber declaratives. Those declaratives tend to either turn anthemic in climatic, shout-along mantras—“Tsunami’s” collective plea for comfort sang with their Epoch pals, “isn’t this silly and aren’t you beautiful”—or quietly eloquent. The album’s final moments represent the former transforming into the latter, as the “Tsunami” chorus reappears before their lone voice exasperatedly asks, “so why are we treating each other like animals?” (Walworth, who is non-binary, uses gender-neutral pronouns). That slippage from comfort to desolation and companionship to solitude is the space Told Slant’s music inhabits.

Walworth’s 2012 debut Still Water rarely strayed from the same C/G chords, and was propelled by sparse banjo plucks and morose guitar riffs that echoed one another song-to-song. Here, Walworth retains the simplicity—maybe getting a bit more adventurous with the chord progressions—but deploys it more intentionally toward constructing a cohesive album. The line of “oh oh oh’s” on “I Don’t” foreshadows the choral melody of “Tsunami,” the latter mentions “a can in my hand” following “Tall Cans Hold Hands,” the end of “Delicate” repeats the climax line of “Low Hymnal” (you “can battering ram this life”), and so on.

It’s the same small phrasebook of melodies, guitar parts, and lyrics erupting over and over into different configurations to create a complexly interconnected whole, but the album’s insularity also sounds cabin fever-esque—fitting, considering the city-born Walworth recorded it in self-professed Bon Iver fashion, sequestered to woodsy seclusion. The songs might be tender in their soft-hearted melancholy, but that strict adherence to spare parameters offers them a punk spirit. It’s a testament to Walworth’s compelling songcraft that despite all the repetition, the album doesn’t sound repetitive, but one wonders how many albums further that project can last.

The sparsity makes room to highlight Walworth’s distinctive trembling warble, which teeters precariously, constantly on the edge of breakdown—a performance of radical vulnerability that serves as the lynchpin of the music’s unique poignancy. “Tsunami” begins with a gravelly mumble of “I want to be a good sky on bad day” before choking a register higher into “and today was a bad day.” The weary lyrics bare an “old soul” demeanor—on their debut, Still Water, they sing about feeling “twice their age”— but the vocal fry and cracks through which they’re delivered are socially coded as gendered markers of adolescence.

Walworth’s voice revels in its own messy excess, repurposing vocal transgressions into fundamental elements of their singing style. It’s a critical model for queer listeners like myself: hearing a non-binary voice celebrate its own liminality helped me learn to honor my own trans feminine body. That conscious claiming of the queer body’s deviance (“still my body will be an illegible one,” Walworth chokes out on Low Hymnal) allows their voice to so powerfully transmit the extensive trauma that queer bodies magnetize.

In particular, this album focuses on the trauma of loss. Love signifies more than just companionship for Walworth. “High Dirge” explores how relationships fundamentally tether them to reality: “I need you around the ground needs a figure just to be something at all.” So the breakups they chronicle represent more than just the loss of a friend, but the more total psychological catastrophe of depersonalization. This album’s predecessor explored immobilization—when “today feels a lot like yesterday” and “it feels like we are in still water.” Going By moves forwards past the stagnancy and suffocation of stillness to the downward spiral of decay: losing lovers, losing yourself, losing your hold on reality, losing the will to live. But in that dissolution of identity, there’s a spark of liberation. The existential angst of being or what am I?—see Still Water’s “I Am Not” and “I’m Real”— transitions to a question of action—what am I going to do?—to which Walworth answers, “I Don’t.” It might not be salvation, but Going By offers a path out of the murk.