I Would Have Died: Lovers

Former Georgian currently rolling in MASS., Carolyn Berk's songs are bruised with an impossible sentimentality, every couplet is a romance, marred with an awkward nostalgia for everything in its wake. Sort of like with real lovers, I suppose. Strange, that. With Lovers, Berk's occasional band, every body part, from wrist to gums, becomes a landscape of locked memory. A landscape that she traverses with a literate, evocative grace, somehow transcending the sap that inherently mires the subject matter of love, loss, hopelessness, and everything else mediocre songwriters tend to muck up.

I spent nearly a year of intensive morbid depression listening to Lovers' Star Lit Sunken Ship, and it was enough to keep the lights out for at least another six months. Every song is a lament of disappointment marked with hopeful defeat, classic "music to slit your wrists to" sentiments over admittedly adult-contempo soundscapes. one of my few truly secret bands.

With The Gutter and the Garden, the band's recently released sophomore number, Berk reconfirms the lyrical prowess initially established with its criminally overlooked predecessor, expanding her disheartened vision with a peppering of conditional optimism. As dreary and droning as ever, The Gutter and the Garden expands the band's sonic scope ever so slightly, minor becomes major a little more often, arrangements elaborated, while maintaining the slight Southern sensibility that grounded their previous effort.

Lovers bum me out more than nearly any other band in my CD collection, and considering my loyalties, that's a feat deserving of the Greatest Band of All Time.