Blue Water White Death is a collaboration between Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg and Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart. As might be expected, it’s not the most joyous affair … though it is pretty. Meiburg and Stewart, who trade-off on vocal duties, wrote the material for the collection, including one track about Juggalos, in a week. The songs are spacious and fractured: The sprawling atmosphere, captured serenely by John Congleton, reminds me of Carey Mercer’s Blackout Beach. Something that ties nicely to the fact that they named themselves after a 1971 documentary about searching for great white sharks in Australia’s Dangerous Reef. In that spirit, I like the overwrought water elements in this description from the press release:

On first listen Blue Water White Death may sound like a pair of reclusive eccentrics making music in a derelict mansion, perilously balancing beauty and horror with the absurd. Soon, it becomes apparent that there are three distinct modes at play – clean, even tones and the nonchalant picking of acoustic guitars that recall life on the open sea, notes and words paced like breaststrokes on the journey to the depths and finally, jarring mysterious noises meshed with vocals that echo the isolated, garbled quantities of the inside of a diver’s mask.

Come up for air and take a listen to “Song For The Greater Jihad.”

• Blue Water White Death – “Song For The Greater Jihad”Download

Blue Water White Death:

01 “This is the Scrunchyface of My Dreams”
02 “Song For The Greater Jihad”
03 “Grunt Tube”
04 “Nerd Future”
05 “The End of Sex”
06 “Death for Christmas”
07 “Gall”
08 “Rendering the Juggalos”

Blue Water White Death is out 10/12 via Graveface.