Sour Widows
Maia Sinaiko and Susanna Thomson like to joke that they are delusional about Sour Widows, the Bay Area band they started seven years ago that is just now releasing its entrancing and powerful debut LP, Revival of a Friend. After all, during those seven years, Sinaiko, Thomson, and Sour Widows have survived a litany of tragedies and tribulations. Sinaiko lost a partner to accidental overdose just before the band began. Thomson’s mother was diagnosed with a rare cancer, which she lived with for four years before passing away in June 2021. As they prepared to enter Oakland’s Tiny Telephone in 2023 to make an album partly of songs about navigating those losses and the lives they shaped, more troubles mounted, including a traumatic breakup and Thomson’s father’s sudden cancer diagnosis. Looking back, they can only laugh at these hurdles and wonder if they should have taken them as signs—to stop, to start over, to succumb to the hardship.
Absolutely not: Sour Widows has served as an essential outlet for Sinaiko, Thomson, and drummer Max Edelman, a way to process real-time woes so as to transmute them into something beautiful, useful, real, and lasting. It has been an anchor, too, keeping them lashed to reality as the world roiled around them. Revival of a Friend is their collective testament to that process, an hour-long lesson in endurance that is years in the making. Inspired by the folk singing of their youth, the grit and grace of Joni Mitchell, the slowly spiraling dazzle of Duster and Bedhead, and the steady angularity and sudden snarl of Slint, Revival of a Friend fully recognizes the arbitrary cruelty of individual existence and finds that some of the best ways beyond it are to share harmonies, a tangle of electric guitars, or a song that simply imagines hope somewhere on the other side. Methodically built over many years with longtime friend and trusted drummer Max Edelman, this is a poignant and gripping record about the pain of growing up and getting on with it.
