A Fear of Open Water by The Exit Bags

For fans of Red House Painters, Duster, and a particularly confessional form of bedroom emo, A Fear of Open Water by The Exit Bags addresses the nonlinear healing process from childhood trauma with the warm darkness of homespun slowcore. Focused on the fallout from a particular unnamed event from the speaker’s childhood, these songs jump across time to assess the impacts both obvious and subliminal that extend into the present day. From anxious outbursts with seemingly unrelated origins today to sleepless nights in the immediate aftermath, all reactions fall into a similar aesthetic treatment to signify their shared origin, all converted into half-whispered poetry layered over loose, meandering guitar tracks. These guitars center the sound, their haphazard intertwinings and cavernous reverb igniting the same fears of dysfunctional loneliness that linger around every corner to haunt the speaker. By externalizing these fears into an artistic voice and applying this sound to all manner of negative emotion, we find the connections between our neuroticism today and events in the past, beginning the healing process by correctly identifying the source of our distress.