Shallowater – God's Gonna Give You A Million Dollars | Album Review
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Thinking about West Texas roots up a string of memories in my mind. One of my earliest was a big family camping trip where my friend’s dad showed us just about every constellation in the sky. He grew up in Dumas and spent countless nights looking at the stars when he was a kid because there wasn't much else to do. For a while, I was going to college in Colorado and making the cross-Texas drive more often than I probably should have. I got to know West Texas by the pit stops along the route and by how much the speed limit decreased from town to town. I eventually transferred to a school in Texas and made friends who had grown up on the left side of the state. One time, we went on a camping trip and stopped in Andrews to pick up some gear from one of their childhood homes. We couldn't use the front door because it was blocked by too many tumbleweeds.
The tumbleweeds blocking my friend’s front door in Andrews, TX.
Shallowater is a three-piece dirtgaze band from West Texas, currently living in Houston. Blake Skipper, Ryan Faulkenberry, and Tristan Kelly made one of the best albums of 2024 with their debut There Is A Well, and I was an immediate fan on first listen. I am an absolute sucker for a band from Texas and feel deeply connected to anyone who grew up there. This thinking may have some validity anywhere other than Texas, where the immense landmass allows for vast differences in culture and experience across the state. There Is A Well is absolutely gorgeous, a beautiful first articulation of the group’s dust-coated take on shoegaze that they’ve built upon elegantly and precisely with their follow-up. As you venture into Shallowater’s sophomore album, God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars, it feels as if the band figured out how to inject the entirety of the Texas Panhandle directly into their songs.
Produced by Alex Farrar, God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars is a smattering of multifaceted epics written from “me” to “you,” showcasing all sides of Shallowater’s sound. This album further solidifies the trio as one of the defining sounds of the modern Texas Panhandle. The album trudges through dust storms, tiptoes across the squeaky floorboards of a shotgun house, and blasts down a pitch-black highway with the windows down.
The first two songs, “God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars” and “Sadie,” seem to tell the same narrative of an experience with grief after the loss of a grandmother. I imagine the grandma being one to poke fun at her own eventual passing, perhaps with the peace of knowing that what was on the other side would be unimaginably better than that of Earth. She would say that when she dies and goes to heaven, God would give her a million dollars and that all her old friends would be there too. The album opens with Grandma having their million dollars and a handful of roses. The rest of the song captures fond memories and personal quirks, ending at a cemetery on New Year's Eve. In “Sadie,” we see some of the ways one processes their grief.
I’ve been writing down
Every word
You said to me
Cause I like the way they look
Bad year for me
And the roses
So I hung
Them up
Like a trophy kill
Nestled midway through the album, we’re out of the house and on the road, taking in the southern part of the country the way that so many experience it: through the window of a car. “Highway” is the best country western song I have heard in quite some time. Reading through the lyrics, I can practically hear George Jones crooning the words over a steady strumming guitar. At the beginning of the song, the line “Back where I was just / lights on a highway to you” devastates as the lyrics articulate that feeling of finding out you weren’t anything to them but another passing car in the night. As the song nears its end, the lyrics are whittled down to only the last six words – this solitary phrase repeating and feeling like a promise or a hope for future trips to that same lost love. While Blake Skipper sings with more of a casual air than Mr. Jones does, he finds the perfect cadence and tone to bring the country western feel out from the yearning lyrics into the song.
We’ve all seen the decrepit house off the highway while cruising along the desolate part of our multi-hour drive. It looks like an island breaching up out of the water, usually surrounded by trees that have grown up taller than what is left of the ruins. It takes a split second to drive by, but years of life have been lived out in that frame. This is the song “All My Love,” except here we have gotten out of the car and are looking through the remains with our adventurous little nephew. It doesn't take long for the detour to turn personal and existential. Nothing is just one thing in this album. We hear a creak come from the framing of the old house, and suddenly we are freshly regretting the unrequited love of years past. Their evocative lyrics remove any chance of gleaning personal information while allowing the beauty of human experience to remain. Every word stretches until it meets the start of the next. It's a long drawl that sounds special on top of the ever-shifting sonic landscape.
Throughout the record, Shallowater exercise a level of skill and restraint that feels increasingly rare to find in “-gaze” bands. These three aren’t just defaulting to a simplistic loud-quiet-loud structure, nor are they pummeling wannabe Deftones riffs through hundreds of dollars of effects pedals. Instead, Shallowater uses these longer song structures to their advantage, exploring the softer side of their sound and executing these changes in sound with careful intention. Sometimes things are rolling along in peaceful post-rock lilt, then suddenly a squall of guitar feedback will rear up and rip you away from the calm. Though it’s more bite-sized in comparison, it’s most reminiscent of another southern rock behemoth: The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads. All of this lends to a sense of vision and atmosphere with seven- to nine-minute songs that hold my attention all the way through, either through beauty or force. Equally skilled at filling the track with huge, crushing sound as they are at finding perfect moments for silence. It’s worldbuilding at its finest, and Shallowater’s world is vast, deep, and dusty.
West Texas is a place where being a cowboy is still a real profession. A place where, when the wind blows just right, and it often does, the air fills with the scent of cow manure from the several million head of cattle that are being raised nearby. Shallowater is a band born from that harsh beauty, and with God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars, they consistently and uniquely serve up the Panhandle on a silver platter for any and all to partake.
Kirby Kluth grew up in the suburbs of Houston but now lives in Knoxville, TN. He spends his time thinking about motorcycles, tennis, and music. You can follow him on Instagram @kirbykluth.
