Look Outside, We’re Dying by Sap House

Fortifying strong bones of midwest emo and slowcore with the eccentricities of noise rock and post rock, Look Outside, We’re Dying by Sap House addresses the slow encroachment of death as those we love start leaving us behind. For Sap House, we stumble through life willfully blind, distracted by menial media and temporal excitements as death closes in on all sides, striking closer and closer until we have nowhere to turn but ourselves. A mournful tone guides the album from the beginning; warm classical violin nestles into a bed of deeply layered twinkly guitars to form an oppressively expansive, crushingly melancholic wall of sound. Midway through this reflection on our mortality and the measures we take to ignore it, masterfully subtle sour notes and light noise remind us of the very real stakes of this dilemma, doubling down on the album’s lyrical urgency despite its lethargic tempo and atmosphere. Anxiety and depression terminate all movement entirely, leaving us at a terrified standstill as the filthy floodwaters of time rise up our shins.