In 2016 White Shape released the White Shape EP, enriching an already growing psychedelic movement that was quickly gathering steam in the fertile grounds of the Northern Illinois music scene. Unwilling to do or be anything within the limits, White Shape quickly expanded like a self-manifested consciousness, creating tapestries of sonic awareness through their subsequent studio albums. White Shape provided an outlet for those who sought to explore the boundaries of what music can do for the transcendence of the self. And then, like in all things, the times changed. For the first time in the modern age all of humanity was reminded that we are all equal. Equal in our ability to feel loss and pain, but also equal in our ability to persevere. And within the balance of those scales no one was left untouched by things made undone. There were endings, conclusions to stories the passing of which we did not want to see. But there were beginnings. There was the start of things. And more yet, there was the fearless refusal to let things pass away entirely. To persist, to change, to transcend. White Shape would emerge from that Charybdis not unscathed, but like Odysseus, having lost some along the way. With the departure of two of the founding members, Josh Weidman and Alyssa Hall set the sails once again to the wind and from the tumult of those incomparable times, they brought into existence their latest album, Through The Lupine. It is decidedly White Shape, with its brooding atmospheres, Hall’s iconic vocals that float and expand until they fill every physical space, and the classic narrative architecture that invites you to enter the music and with it create your own inner worlds. You can hear these in every track, and particularly in “Draped Urns.” But as it has been said, no one came through those times unscathed, untouched. Within the quintessential White Shape sound there’s something else, something new. It can be heard in the previously released “Knives Down”; a shift in the barometric pressure, a sea change both profound and subtle. It's a defiance, a refusal to go quietly into that good night, but with undercurrents of something else, something not yet found in the band’s prior work. Is it optimism? Hope? Or simply the resignation to create for the sake of creating. The true value of Through The Lupine is that it provides the listener with the space to craft their own interpretation. For the White Shape fan, there is everything you love and want. There’s just more. And it’s different. It’s evolved. For the initiate, there is the beginning. The introduction to the next understanding of what it means to experience music.
