40 Watt Sun - Little Weight

Angry Metal Guy 80

“If [Warning’s Watching from a Distance] was the act of capturing a funeral march, and The Inside Room was the first few hours of sadness that lingers after the wake wraps up, then Wider is the first year of longing and sadness that follows.” This is how Grymm characterized the trajectory of Patrick Walker’s projects in his review of 40 Watt Sun’s sophomore album. The metaphor has stuck with me ever since, as great metaphors tend to do. 2022’s Perfect Light, then, slotted in beautifully as the first hope that the grief may pass, a first feeble ray of sunlight through a blanket of grey clouds. It appears Mr. Walker’s mental state has been improving, but how does that affect his music?

Little Weight continues the progression toward the light in true 40 Watt Sun fashion, with slow and thoughtful deliberation rendered in a blend of shoegaze and doom that has been stripped of almost all distortion. But after a career built on music about grief, pain and loss, this album is at last fully about love, gratitude and healing. Instead of a feeble ray, now the sunlight pours in through the open window, mites of dust twinkling in the beams on a blissful autumn afternoon. ‘Who am I to feel so strong?’ Walker croons across the opening chords of “Closer to Life.” Opener “Pour Your Love” revels in a newfound sense of affection, as does the tender “Feather” with its repeated stanza ‘If I could reach these arms, winding out forever, I will.’ Walker’s voice remains a study in the dissemination of emotion, not beautiful from a technical standpoint but wrought with such heartfelt honesty I buy his every word and every feeling completely and utterly.

Little Weight by 40 Watt Sun

The shift in lyrical tone is accompanied by an appropriate shift in the music. 40 Watt Sun always played with empty space and silence as a means to deepen the sense of loss and absence befitting its themes. Little Weight is richer, warmer, and textured more thickly with stacked layers of guitars forming a gently lapping ocean surf of melancholic comfort. Though its pace remains patient and deliberate, the tracks are notably less protracted than before, moving away from the compositional emptiness expressed on the predecessors and toward a sort of relative conciseness.¹ This conciseness makes Little Weight both the most diverse and accessible album in the band’s discography. Subtle backing vocals emphasize the love in the opener; a melancholic twang pervades “Astoria”; “Half a World Away” makes its mark through a beautiful, breathtaking piece of guitar. The individual identity of each track is much stronger than it’s ever been, and the album is all the better for it.

There are no particular weak points on Little Weight in my view; at least, not more than nitpicks. Though the back half of “The Undivided Truth” is undeniably gorgeous, it takes a minute or two too long to get there, and some tracks lack a proper ending (“Pour Your Love” drops this ball in particular). Most of all, though, 40 Watt Sun is simply a very niche band. It asks for patience, to buy into the slow minimalism, and with Walker’s voice such a prominent feature, a lot hinges on whether his tear-stricken performance connects with you or not. This vocal-centric approach is a feature, not a bug, as the thoughtful production frequently emphasizes, but the full textures and warm sound are mastered perfectly across the entire running time.

If 40 Watt Sun hooks you the way it hooked me back in 2016, though, Little Weight is an experience unlike any other. It’s not metal, and it does not have a very metal attitude with its melancholic sense of contentment, but it’s a new evolution of an incredibly idiosyncratic outfit that forges its own path with serenity and wonder grown from pain and loss. It gives me a sense of spiritual fulfillment few records have achieved, with each of the 6 tracks a new emotional highlight. Patrick Walker and his crew demonstrate that when grief and loss fall behind, love and beauty can still ache just the same.

Rating: 4.0/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: Fisher’s Folly
Websites: 40wattsunmusic.bandcamp.com | 40wattsun.co.uk | facebook.com/40wattsun
Releases Worldwide: September 6th, 2024

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