Calm, collected math rock

Equal parts meticulously designed and free-flowing, effloresce marks an ambitious debut for the Bay Area three-piece, Covet. Fronted by guitarist Yvette Young, the group plays a forward-thinking style of math rock—lyric-less and cascading—that captured audiences with the band’s first released material, the Currents EP in 2015. Three years since Currents and the band has seen a lineup change (the switch of drummers is most notable). Upon the very first few moments of effloresce listening, it becomes very clear that Covet’s music is predicated on a mutual appreciation for adventurous, albeit noodling, expression. The personality of their work oozes through Young’s mastery of guitar scales, bassist David Adamiak’s wandering grooves and drummer Forrest Rice’s kinetic energy. For fans of their potential-ridden EP, effloresce should not disappoint. This record builds upon their past work’s beautiful moments and casts some much-needed darkness and jagged edges on their music.

“Shibuya (Ft. Han Solo)” begins the album on an offbeat, as if Covet picked up on these six tracks where the previous six of Currents concluded. The repeated phrasings on “Shibuya” eventually morph into the song’s primary melody, and at about the track’s midpoint the musical composition takes on a greater identity than its three members seem to elucidate: one can hear glimpses of a synth creeping in the background, the crunch of Young’s guitar and her dynamic ability to traverse octaves within a scale. “Glimmer,” constructed on the back half of “Shibuya,” opens up the more rhythmic elements to Covet’s sound: very early on, Rice’s drumming becomes the focal point of this track.

Titling instrumental tracks seems dangerously straightforward, but “Sea Dragon (Ft. Mario Camarena)” plays like a deep-sea dive. Background synths give the impression of sunlight breaking through the ocean surface. The song’s rhythm section drives home a vigorous image of a sea creature slowly rising from the depths. “Gleam” sounds remarkably dissimilar to the tracks before it (more brooding, less busy, with an overt Mogwai influence), while penultimate “Falkor” (ostensibly named after The Neverending Story character) looks to dance around several playful hooks in its eight-minute running time.

Of the two conventional definitions of the word effloresce (one of which, as evidenced from the album cover, relates to flowers), it is understood that Covet, substantively, is merely at the beginning of an original and adventurous career. The production and projection of this group only have more room to blossom.