Brackwater

Brackwater are an indie rock band who arrange around the drums. It is the first thing anybody notices and it is deliberate: the drummer writes the parts before the guitars arrive, and the songs are built to leave room for a kit that is doing more than keeping time.

The band came together late, after all four had spent years in groups that ended badly, and they wrote a set of rules on the first day. Every song is finished before it is recorded. Nobody plays over the vocal. Anyone can stop a take. Those rules have survived.

Their first record was made across eleven months in short bursts between other work, and it sounds like it in the best way: the tempos differ, the sounds differ, and the sequencing does the work of holding it together. They have said they would not make one that way again, and are making the second one exactly that way.

On stage the band plays hard and talks very little. The material runs faster live than on record, by roughly the margin a room adds on its own, and the endings are longer.

They have built an audience slowly and locally, mostly by playing the same rooms until people came back, and have shown no interest in the shortcuts available to a band with a good first record.