Out and About, the fourth album from Rotterdam quartet Lewsberg, is a collection of hypnotic, talky post-punk that hinges entirely on atmosphere. It’s music for small rooms with weird lighting, old churches where you have to sit on a bench, graveyards where you are always standing under a tree. It is also poetic but in an extremely self-aware and twee kind of way, doing things like meditating on the difference between “dog” and “god” or describing a weirdly sexy interaction with a doctor.
Out and About plays like a mumblecore flick. The characters walk around musing about the meaning of life, winking after every sentence. They are prone to cerebral concepts, bringing in geometric optics into the song “Angle of Reflection,” but they find a way to immediately make it sound chill. They bring in an organ; a lonely drumbeat, practically unchanging; a crisp bassline, soft and almost out of focus. All of it flickers like a candle in a nightclub bathroom where you’d maybe hide out to avoid someone. Vocalists Arie van Vliet and Shalita Dietrich turn the environment into something spectral, intimate. “So there’s nothing new and I’m easily bored,” sings Dietrich, before following it up with “All I have to know: Would you do it once more?” She’s being deliberately cryptic, a mood that permeates the whole of the record.
As musicians, Lewsberg pulls from the best of everything twee, dreamy, and naive. Out and About is a little Stereolab in the Stunning Debut Album primordial era, when things were more lo-fi and guitar-oriented. It’s also a little VU, if Maureen Tucker got to sing more, or the Moldy Peaches in leather jackets. “An Ear to the Chest” has the album’s best guitar moment, a pristine break in the middle that is almost erotic, unbearably lovely. “Communion” is a song that is possibly about being friends with Jesus Christ: “Bless the lord! My soul/Watch his body from above,” sings van Vilet, the music growing scuzzier in the background.
On Out and About, Lewsberg are self-possessed, in touch with their aesthetic. They write songs that are funny, sweet, and weird. The music is an ever so slight sharpening and varnishing of the band’s past work. More so than melodic or lyrical choices, Lewsberg now focus on the small universe of a song, how different textures can alter the full effect. The violin on “Going Places” is like a small mouse running through some grass. Standout track “A Different View” pirouettes around like a toy ballerina in her miniature box, delicately atmospheric. Lewsburg are masters at conjuring these moods, capturing idiosyncrasies and turning them into intricate pop.