A Light at the Bottom of a Well
Sight Without Seeing
2025
GENRE: Rock
LABEL: Dead Oceans
REVIEWED: October 17, 2025
On their sophomore album, the soulful folk-rock duo reaches new sonic heights that are counteracted by awkward and blundering thematic subjects.
Sight Without Seeing, the project of youngsters Jeremy Beck and Dominic Greer, brings an indie-spirited, eccentric energy to A Light at the Bottom of a Well. Like the first girl in your grade to wear a training bra, they are doing something no one has ever done before. Thrusting, capacious horns pair with sullen banjo to support Beck’s drawling whine and create a cavernous aural space together.
Where the duo stumbles, though, is the topics they focus on lyrically. Their struggles are incredibly apparent on the track, “The Flower I Hold Between My Fingers,” where the subject is grappling with feelings of love and desperation. These admissions of love feel spurious, like the correlation between divorcees in Maine and consumption of margarine. Just completely fraudulent. It feels completely unbelievable that two 20 year-old men could be so emotional. This problem plagues them on nearly every track, making the thematic creed of the album feel like a failed attempt at romantic sentimentality.
Putting aside the objectionable emotional content, the sonic strength of the album stands on its own. Each song builds its own world, like “Wild Thyme,” where the wobbly, winding finger-plucking feels like a crochet blanket wrapping gently around your shoulders, keeping you warm from an autumn chill. The closing track, “Colorlessness,” is tenebrous but titillating. You’re transported to a dark room. You’re sitting on the bed while your lover pulls down the shades and walks over, laying you down. Sight Without Seeing is the dark room, the lover, the bed, and the shades, and you, all at once. A Light at the Bottom of a Well is characterized by this polyphonic sensibility, and clearly indicates an ameliorative direction for their auricular capabilities. To reach a new hemisphere of skill, they will simply need to discover how to feel emotions better.
