Much of the tracklist takes inspiration from The Velvet Underground, and the songs where that are most prominent are “Rhymes of an Hour” and “Umbilical”. From the unending succession of plucks on its lead strings to how percussion is used on “Rhymes of an Hour”, its debt to “Heroin” is profound. “Umbilical” sounds like a version of one of those noise tracks The VU made but, overlooking its subject of vanishing twin syndrome, is beautiful, almost as if “The Murder Mystery” had been explicitly written to be played at a wake. Hypothetically, that could be the vanished twin’s wake. The entire album could be played during a funeral service, the same way Martha Stewart called So Tonight That I Might See a good record to play at a dinner party.

“Roseblood”, one of the more straightforward shoegaze tracks, recounts a young woman simultaneously concealing and displaying her depression, through fake smiles and self-inflicted knife wounds, as she descends deeper into it daily. It reinforces lyrical angst with guitar tones that are dirtily distorted and charged by one of the few appearances a drum kit makes on the album.

Then, there is perhaps the most famous cut on the LP, “Look on Down from the Bridge”, in which the song’s protagonist looks below to the water beneath a bridge, and contemplates jumping. The organ gives a haunting impression of pain and the guitar paints the kinds of things you feel when you cry in a symbiotic somber, carried off like a coffin by percussion. This is a song that’s beautiful in the way that death can be beautiful.