Review: Thayer Sarrano – Shaky

Thayer Sarrano
Shaky

The Guildwater Group
Street: 08.28
Thayer Sarrano = Des Ark x The Black Ryder + Chelsea Wolfe

Thayer Sarrano’s psych-infused shoegaze is dark and beguiling, steeped in the thick, swampy, feverish nights of the South. The bedimmed soundscape—which is sometimes twanging, sometimes trembling, sometimes rambling—brings to mind moonlit red brick and shadowed magnolia trees. Sarrano’s vocals are spellbinding, too. Her hazy, roving choruses in “Touch My Face” make their way into long, haunting vocalizations in the percussive “Lost Art.” In “Crease,” Sarrano is hell-bent on entrancing listeners, churning her vocals into sprawling layers of guitar and dense atmospherics. Shaky is Southern gothic at its finest and most bewitching, and Sarrano is exquisite as she uncovers and releases, one by one, the ghosts and stories we’ve left handcuffed under floorboards. –Kathy Zhou