Hundred Waters, a band formed in 2011 with roots in Gainesville, has covered genres from electronic to indie to folk to hip-hop with their tempos and drums over their last couple projects. Though their self-titled album, released in 2012, introduced the ability to cover those genres, the band’s most recent effort, “The Moon Rang Like A Bell,” enhanced and honed in on those sounds.
The album’s narrative lead singer Nicole Miglis on a 12-track quest for peace and trust in someone or something, only to bear her loneliness and incompleteness on the album’s final track, “No Sound.” But where the lyrics are sometimes drowned out or hard to understand because they act as an instrument, the band excels in its enhanced production to help visualize Miglis’ narrative.
The backing members of Hundred Waters surround Miglis’ high-pitched, spacious voice with a combination of electro-pop synths (“Xtalk”), dusty pianos (“Murmurs”) and heavy bass and drums (“Innocent”), even using Miglis’ voice as an instrument (“Murmurs”), to enhance the songs’ themes of untrustworthiness, loneliness and love.
For example, the wooden, jungle-esque xylophones in “[Animal]” and the galloping drums in “Seven White Horses” both add deeper layers to the overall sound, which is much more than guitar and piano chords with matching bass notes and drums. Every note, every distortion of the voice, every bass hit means something to the narrative.
The band has grown in every aspect of its music since its first project released two years ago from the production to the over-arching sound, and “The Moon Rang Like A Bell” is the band’s best work yet.
[A version of this story ran on page 9 on 6/5/2014 under the headline "GNV band makes waves"]
Hundred Waters, a band from Gainesville, released their latest album "The Moon Rang Like A Bell" last week.
