Water Shrew Trio “Grub” LP (Eiderdown)

Given that music itself is a physical manifestation, perhaps what marks Water Shrew Trio’s LP Grub as a “success” is that it isn’t merely affective (though it certainly is that, too.) It doesn’t feel like a distillation so much as a broadening series of gestures made by arms and legs, mouths, fingers, and feet, varying in degrees of enthusiasm and restraint. It doesn’t negate or simplify certain sensations in order to showcase others. It doesn’t understate, but neither is it explicit or maximal. It is certainly more than just the sum of its sounds.

Grub unfolds like the documentation of not only a journey taken or a roster of landscapes traversed, but it also gathers together the trains of thought that might have served as beacons or breadcrumbs along the way. Like many great efforts in capital-D Drone, it takes these myriad components and slides them like beads onto a thread suspended in a void. Freed from the yoke of gravity, these beads crystallize and slip back and forth along their paths of time, budding, blooming, wilting, dying, and sparking the perfect repetition of their own rebirths.

This is all to say that the album is a bouquet of sensations both physical and emotional. There are the corporeal suggestions–scrapes, grindings, tuts, and stutters that evoke the prickling of skin tightening against winter wind, the tongue pressing against the palate, the muscles of the shoulders moving in locomotive rhythm, the eyes surveying sunlight spearing through ragged, shifting clouds, the organic pistons of the legs working through the afternoon air, the same air that plays catch-and-release with the sturdy bellows of the lungs. There are the suggestions of the void–ever-loosening spirals of electric and acoustic drones that seem quite at home within the infinite, not so much like the ripples on a body of water so much as the irresistible momentum that compels the ripples. Finally, there are the spiritual suggestions–human voices and the chiming of synthesizers that cyclonically mingle, emerging in shapes of sorrow and exuberance, despair and hopefulness, woven twins that form a single, infinite thread.

Grub is both of its time and beyond it in either direction. Sound and atmosphere have long conspired to help us make sense of the bewildering vastness of all that surrounds us, enabling us to ride atop the crush of Absolutely Everything for a time before joining the fold. Here is an album that celebrates the former, accepts the latter, and reflects it all quite honestly.

-Jen Powers, February 2026