Smith Westerns :: "3am Spiritual"

A shimmering and delicate slice of the late stages of a summer night, Smith Westerns latest single, "3am Spiritual" possesses only a few moments of bombast. The chiming synth and guitar progression that follow the band's carefree group vocal, "whoa ... yeah", exactly the kind of non-answer that the second-half of a parabolic evening demands. Better yet, the second movement, a keyboard interlude lifted right from Win Butler's "We Used To Wait", seemingly doubles the layers of the refrain, a last languid look down a nostalgic hallway. The band sings, "You don't look like you used to be," a type of easy sadness so uniform, it can't possibly be original or surprising. And yet, pitching themselves as the last heirs to a fragile and nearly deceased world, Smith Westerns have one of the better songs of the year, an invented moment in the last iterations before dawn, the unremembered guitars of the 1970s slow-dancing with the anachronistic, gauzy synthesizers that never seemed to exist until now.