![]() Schneider envisioned the album Lonesome Dreams as a soundtrack of sorts to a book series of the same name.The band’s name derives from Lake Huron, which frontman Ben Schnieder spent time on the shores of as a child, but the band itself is based in Los Angeles.So I’ll try to break it down into bullet points to ensure that this doesn’t get too long-winded and confusing. And I’ve chosen it as the subject of this month’s “nostalgia review”, even though to my ears this thing is still very new.Įxplaining the concept behind Lord Huron is likely to be met with a hefty dose of “Wait, so let me get this straight…” type responses. Their debut album, Lonesome Dreams, pretty much instantly rocketed its way into the upper tiers of my best-of-the-decade list when I made a point of listening to it in full. Really all it took was a single song on a personally curated playlist (and later another for good measure) and I was pretty much instantly hooked. Turns out I had heard them before, but never heard of them. Very late in 2019, in the middle of a gargantuan attempt to catch up with as much great music as possible that I had missed out on earlier in the decade, my wife managed to blindside me with the discovery of a band that I had honestly never heard of before. The band has evolved a bit in the years since, but nothing they’ve done since then has hit me nearly as hard. ![]() Lord Huron’s unique habit of weaving together pieces of a story in anachronic order, told from the perspective of a not-so-reliable narrator, as well as their occasional use of electronic and worldbeat elements, helps to set their songwriting style apart from influences like Fleet Foxes and My Morning Jacket that they quite obviously wore on their sleeves at this point. The music portion of South By Southwest runs from March 12-March 17.In Brief: An astounding debut that immediately transports me back to the days when the indie folk revival was still going strong. What’s a guy gotta do to get a key change? But Houck’s main problem lies with the rhythm section lay a few James Brown records on that drummer and call me in the morning. Workmanlike guitars did their level best to elevate the proceedings, but the utter lack of anything in the way of syncopation or musical surprise was sort of astonishing. The group offered four songs, all ballads (even when the bass was hitting it hard) and all rather maudlin-sounding, too, though it can be quite hard to distinguish the lyrics of founder/frontman Matthew Houck (he sings in the tight-mouthed Dylan vein, or in the reticent phrasings of Tallest Man on Earth’s Kristian Matsson). Shortly after the Huron show, I hit the HypeMachine showcase to catch Phosphorescent, a band that has fared better among indie tastemakers. ![]() The band commandeers various virtues of the Shins and the Foxes, yes, but with an undeniable voice of its own-and a very welcoming one indeed. Drummer Mark Barry fixes a tambourine above his hi-hat (a smart technique and one I’m surprised more percussionists don’t use) and tends to lean in when he’s layering beats within beats on the toms with a pair of mallets. ![]() On slow-jams “Ghost on the Shore” and “In the Wind,” the band stretched its legs without ever noodling, the guitars urging each other up the fretboard and twining into a wail as plaintive and memorable as Schneider’s own stratospheric voice. Fellow axe men Tom Renaud and Karl Kerfoot are capable of the hard-grind sonic breakdown one expects from Wilco, but they also create upper-register textures so rich that there’s no need for organ-the band doesn’t have one. But Schneider’s band is so good that his occasionally inscrutable lyrics about the splendors of nature, etc., come off as a conscious counterpoint to the very electric propulsion of the music. Yes, the Foxy touches are undeniable: slow, incremental guitar melodies that sound like Aaron Copland lost in the forest, and soaring, reverbed vocal harmonies that belong in a cathedral. That, at any rate, was the reassuring sense I got at last night’s show. What’s so annoying about the hyper-referential haters is that they rarely consider the possibility that perhaps frontman/founder Ben Schneider is drawing not on Robin Pecknold or Jim James, but on a plenty worthy muse of his own. Pitchfork damned Lonesome Dreams, the group’s 2012 debut, with whisperingly faint praise, invoking the Foxes (and My Morning Jacket) wherever possible and rating the record a glum 5.6/10. Also, I have now basically seen Fleet Foxes #twobirds #SXSW.” What I didn’t realize then was just how bluntly the comparison had been used to bludgeon the band into spinoff status. I owe Lord Huron a partial apology: During the band’s grandiose, enveloping set at the Austin City Limits Moody Theater yesterday I dropped a lazy tweet: “Entrancing performance from Lord Huron at ACL Theater.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |