Pitchfork

There is a minor-key guitar crawl, alternately spidery and slashing. There is the singer's nauseous vibrato, delicate as black lace one moment, a towering howl the next, lithely covering all the subtle gradations in between. There are haunted-house strings that swoon toward a terse death-march at the song's crescendo, and there are open-wound lyrics flecked with hard-bitten expletives: "Let's cry our fecking eyes out 'cause we know no one will care for us" and "Let's feck and let's expect it when we don't feel any better."

It sounds like a Bright Eyes song circa Fevers and Mirrors, but it's actually this depressive dirge by Des Ark. While the idiom is similar to Oberst's, you could never accuse Aimee Argote of being derivative-- she's too harrowingly real. She's a better singer than Oberst, with a range and tonal control to match her gift for expressivity, and where he self-pities, she gets pissed-- seldom has a lament for one perfect summer sounded so honestly bitter instead of the standard bittersweet. Argote belts as if her very life depends on externalizing her rage, which, in concert with the music's raw-boned stomp, is just fecking stunning.

[From Battle of the Beards (with Ben Davis & the Jetts); out now on Lovitt]