***If you haven’t listened to WATER LIARS, let the music be your introduction. Is it important to know that BRYANT is from Mississippi and KINKEL-SCHUSTER is from Arkansas, that they’re shaped by the writers whose influence shines through in everything they make—Frank Stanford and Barry Hannah especially—and that their pain is the pain of the wretched and beautiful South. Sure, and it’s all there in the songs. On “Vespers,” Kinkel- Schuster sings, “When I left her house / It was snowing out / and I left her for the South / But who cares? / We don’t want no one to see us cry. / No, darling, we’d rather die.” These are songs about leaving and staying, about lost fathers and new loves, about distance and memory. These songs are a consideration of what Kentucky poet Joe Bolton called “a future that seems already to have acquired / The irrevocability of the past.” These songs smell of autumn. These songs are the hugeness of rain, the heaviness of breath, the strangeness of cities. Light a cigarette and close your eyes—let these songs whiskey into you, let them brighten your blood, let them be endless in the night.