"From the Hills Below the City" and "Little Neon Limelight" are not groundbreaking; the annals of American music burst with Southern rock ballads, discography's of rotating raconteurs, vivid characters from the old American West, gold mines and oil spills, eyes on the future with a finger on the pulse of the past, and all-together-now! chanting. If you're not inventing something, or discovering something or sticking your neck out to pretend to be a trend setter, then you're relying on your own excellence to stand out.
Craig Biggio made a Hall of Fame MLB career out of solid excellence. He's the guy who bends his knees and gets his glove on the ground, and gets his body in front of the bounce of a hard-hit seeing eye, but gets the out. He's the guy who almost broke the record for times being hit by a pitch, and yet never in his life charged the mound. Craig Biggio never broke any ground, never did anything new. He played baseball the way that billions of children have been taught to play baseball since the Elysian Fields first pitch on June 19, 1846.
Houndmouth play music "in the tradition." They show up on stage, and they take all the words of a regular old paragraph, and rearrange them into something beautiful. These songs have something else going for them, something behind them that you won't find in all other songs in that hallway of American folk-rock heroes. There's a spirit, a soul there, which is often something that comes from a band with a singular voice writing and singing their music, and even then isn't necessarily the greatest thing. It's a soul of tragedy, and a soul of joy, that shockingly wed to make beauty and power in the two albums that their 23 songs spill out over the course of.
This power and this beauty make Houndmouth the modern equivalent of the American country rock band ideal. They are the quintessential, the archetypal, the model with which everything else deviates from, and I think they know it, too. There have been bands since The Band who have, whether knowingly or not, reached for this idealized version of themselves, but not many have come as close as these four twenty-somethings from New Albany, Indiana; the Grateful Dead made their own detours on the way, becoming as much a jam band as anything else; Little Feat were halted tragically, although they are one of the closest possible, by Lowell George's death in 1979 before the release of their 7th album, the Flying Burrito Brothers are too much of a side-project oddity; any band with Neil Young (Buffalo Springfield/Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young/Crazy Horse) could be in contention, but they're all often at risk of being too far taken into being "Neil Young" bands, which I'm not helping by introducing them that way; Dawes are the modern equivalent, and have superiority over any newcomers for now, as they are three albums deep and are closer than most anyone else older than them (Deer Tick, Mumford & Sons, The Avett Brothers, The Decemberists, The Drive-By Truckers, etc.).
Dawes and Houndmouth, and of course, the group to which I'm comparing all of these groups, The Band, feel like collaborative efforts that come out as cohesive as if they weren't. They are what Stillwater from Almost Famous wants to be. They are bands with equal members, where voices matter, and each member is only as famous and well-known as the band can be itself. They turn around and look each other in the eyes on stage with the same sparkle of grandeur as they do when they're peering out over the congregation off-stage. One can only imagine that they never even had to make that silly little pact that so many cautionary tales of aspiring rock and roll ensembles make amongst themselves in their very first garage session, something about their goals and what's best for everyone is best for the band and so on, because they all just already knew that stuff, without it ever being said. I, of course, have never been in the presence of the members of any of these bands but during a show or during a meet-and-greet afterwards, so my assumptions are simply that, but this doesn't matter. It's not necessarily that they are this ideal so much as they come off as this ideal, which is enough.
There's a difference, though; The Band could never have written lines like "I've got my gin tucked in my purse," or "I just wasn't made for no diamonds or no pearls." The ideal has equilibrium between its members, but it also has a solid sound, a collaborative voice, basic instruments, and now, what Houndmouth has that these other bands don't, it has at least one female voice that more than just complements the gruff baritones surrounding it, which Katie Toupin does in spades.
There's a town that must exist somewhere in the world, where the characters of Houndmouth songs exist, and wander about in their dusty overalls, pushing plows and drilling for oil, spitting in the sand, living out tragic lives but always searching for joy in the tragedy. There's an anachronicity inherent in the world here, that exists in the world we currently live in or it's near future, but the characters still don't know that. "Sedona" laments the old world of filmmaking and storytelling by way of a little city in Arizona that was a popular film shoot location in the '70s, but has been used sparingly since then. Sedona is more than a movie shoot, though, and "Sedona" knows that here: there are (apparently) beautiful sandstone formations, due to the "presence of hematite." When the sun hits the red, it shines. The old world of Hollywood isn't the only thing that's changed from the '70s to now, but storytelling in general has become more structured and less oblique, more indoors and less outdoors. Sitting in front of those red rocks when the sun goes down must be a story for the ages. Maybe I'll bring some headphones there someday and see what "Sedona" has to say about that.
The protagonist in "Penitentiary" tells a classic outlaw story, full of escapes and sing-a-long choruses. "Casino (Bad Things)" has a messy and badass woman rollicking through her life. "For No One"'s main character is stuck in a rut that most of us can recognize. The town, imagined or grounded, also has a daughter named Jane, a Cherokee descendant named Palmyra, a cousin Greg on his way out of town, an insane trust-fund baby named Oliver Ashley Lane (I think), people who drill for oil and people who lament the spilling and harm it causes, people who can't sleep, people who love and people who hurt. There's trucks and beards and photon ray guns. This town is more than the grandiose versions of our own mundanities, more than just mythic expansions of me and you, they are actual colorful personalities living striking lives in the service of allegory and anecdote. They are literary short stories rather than flowery poems, with beginnings and ends that don't give a damn if they're contrived, because that's what the story is about.
Thank god that Houndmouth was able to grow in between these two albums, bringing out the electricity in their songs without going the modern version of full-on electric. That lit-up vibrancy is apparent in the songs on their first album like a folk-rock Killers atmosphere, and has even more musical evidence here on the follow-up, not to mention the artwork accompanying most of the singles and the grainy, washed out footage with glimmers of neon in the videos, and the album's title. Hopefully, Houndmouth's "Basement Tapes" is still to come, and their "Last Waltz" is decades away.
I've already got tickets for some of the East Coast dates; April 1 in New York, April 3 in Boston, April 4 in Philadelphia. I'm planning on writing about those three shows, and hopefully by then "Little Neon Limelight" will have had more time inside of my head and on my needle (vinyl arrives on St. Patrick's Day).
"From the Hills Below the City" came out in 2013, and "Little Neon Limelight" will be here on March 17, but is streaming right now on npr.
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