Album Of The Week: Forest Swords Engravings

If you're a hawkeyed, dangerously obsessive Stereogum reader, you might have noticed that I didn't start posting until late on Friday morning. That's because I was in the parking lot of my neighborhood Trader Joe's, loitering and trying not to look creepy while I waited for the tow truck that would take my non-starting car to the closest mechanic. While I was at the mechanic, smelling that rubber smell and ignoring the courtroom reality show on the waiting-room TV, the skies opened up. I walked home through that rain. This isn't a woe-is-me story; my car is fine now, and it wasn't even that expensive to fix. It is, however, a story about how, when I drippily trudged into my home office late on Friday morning, I was not exactly feeling great about the world or anything in it. That's when I threw on Engravings, the new Forest Swords album, and let myself disappear into it. Every once in a while, we hear a piece of music that absolutely, perfectly matches up with our surroundings and our inner landscapes, and those moments stick with us. And I cannot imagine a more perfect soundtrack for that grey, soggy, money-stressed morning than Engravings. If you haven't listened to Engravings while feeling generally bleak and awful, then you haven't really listened to it.