NM/NM. never played, not sealed.

When Chris Cheveyo abandoned the finalized recording of his heavy instrumental post-rock band towards the end of 2010, it wasn’t out of a general cynicism towards expansive, heady music. There was just something about that specific palette of tones and the cut-and-dry melodrama of the songwriting that wasn’t satisfying anymore. So he culled his old habits and made a fresh start with Rose Windows, a Seattle-based sextet that drew upon everything from American folk to West Saharan guitar rock, from pentatonic proto-metal to traditional Persian music, from the darker corners of California’s early psych scene to the hazy atmospherics of contemporary drone artists.

It was a risky era for this sort of bold new venture—there was a lot of talk of austerity in 2010. People were upside-down on their mortgages. Gas prices were high. Not surprisingly, many of the new musicians of the Great Recession were solo bedroom artists, laptop producers, and lo-fi aficionados. It was a time to think small and live within one’s means. It was an inopportune time to create the kind of lavish, orchestral, spacious records that came out of the peak of album-oriented rock radio of the ‘70s. And yet that’s the kind of record Rose Windows made in the fall of 2011. Their debut album, The Sun Dogs, was a brave record—exploratory, diverse, and lush. It didn’t fit in with the escapist pulse of indie dance music, or the retrograde scuzz of garage rock, or the bucolic nostalgia of the breezy new folk scene. The Sun Dogs, with it’s bluesy dirge, exotic scales, and majestic sprawl, didn’t quite fit it anywhere. Yet its theme of “the everyday blues that capitalism and its hit man, religion, bring on all of us” was certainly apropos of the time.