New York's indie label Captured Tracks will celebrate its fifth birthday next weekend with a mini-festival featuring most of its roster, including DIIV, Mac Demarco, Wild Nothing and that poster couple for washed-out wistfulness, Widowspeak. You immediately know what you're getting with Captured Tracks bands: shimmering, luminescent music, like the vapour trails of the 90s shoegazing bands. Yet Widowspeak bring their own nuances. Currently touring their second album, Almanac, vocalist Molly Hamilton and guitarist Robert Earl Thomas are the hippies in the hipster family – long hair and loose clothes in earthy hues.
Hamilton, dressed in a long, floaty skirt and strumming a white Telecaster, sings with a kind of tuneful exhale. Thomas's doctrine is the dream-pop holy trinity of delay, jangle and fuzz. You have to feel sold slightly short by their choosing to performing along to rhythm backing tracks, but such are the harsh economic realities for small bands. This is the first tour they've done entirely by train, Hamilton explains – "Guitars," she says, before Thomas finishes her sentence, "on our backs."
Much is made of Widowspeak's similarities to Mazzy Star, though another comparison, of Hamilton's voice if nothing else, might be with Victoria Bergsman's Taken By Trees, during sun-dappled single True Believer especially. Their cover of Wicked Game has a tragic air that suggests the original's video should not have featured Chris Isaak frolicking on a beach but walking despairingly into the sea. Without a band behind them, it all begins to feel slight, but they achieve greater presence with The Dark Age, which begins with Hamilton laughing at the cheesiness of saying goodbye over canned bass and drums, and ends with her joining Thomas in layering on the distortion, heads lowered, hair tumbling over their faces. Plenty more moments like that hopefully lie further down the tracks.
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