Hermit Thrushes – Slight Fountain – Album Review

The things that most folks are going to hone in on when listening to (or commenting on if you’re in the 40% of the population that has a music blog) Hermit Thrushes’ sophomore release (out June 23 on Joyful Noise) are the weirder bits: the dissonance, sharply angular guitar sounds, odd stops and starts, occasional free jazz solo, impressionistic and scattershot lyrical content, wildly disorganized and chaotic acoustic soundscapes and, perhaps most strikingly, the ten seconds of a field recording of cats mewling.  All of that stuff is in here and I don’t think you’ll hear anyone denying that this is a gleefully strange record.  But.  Underneath that layer of eccentricity, there are some really good tunes.  The tracks with the thick covering of oddball lacquer become endearing after a few listens and the tracks that are more direct and tuneful are appealing right from the start.  In the final analysis, Slight Fountain doesn’t sound like a lot of other records I’ve spun this year (the label throws around comparisons to bands like Captain Beefheart and Polvo, but those dudes didn’t put out records in 2009 yet) and that’s a distinctly good thing; as much as I love tender folk music (Vetiver) and noise rock pastiches (DD/MM/YYYY), it’s nice to hear at least one record from an “indie” band that doesn’t fit into those two broad categories.

One of the first things that jumps out about Slight Fountain is it’s dueling brevity and verbosity.  There are fourteen tracks on the record, but it clocks in at a brisk 29.8 minutes.  (Think about that for a minute.  You can jam nineteen Minor Threat songs into a half an hour, but Hermit Thrushes are not a hardcore band.  Doing the out-there abstract dissonance over songs with constantly shifting structures in the time it takes for an episode of The Simpsons is kind of a neat trick.)  This rapid jumping from idea to idea allows Slight Fountain to cover a lot of ground and completely disarms the listener’s ability to get bored or distracted.  The longest track is the opener (more on that soon), clocking in at four minutes, but most of the tracks are over in two or less.  Not digging the meandering, semi-gloominess of “Black Cat?”  Don’t worry, it’s over really soon.  On the flip side, if you love “Black Cat,” pay attention, it’s over really soon.  (By the way, if you’re not into that tune, there’s a problem.  It’s complexity and restless shifting are a clear highpoint.  You might not enjoy it if you’re a tasteless plebe, but you wouldn’t be reading us then, would you?)

This intriguing use of time is all over the record; not only is it a lot of songs in a short time, but the way the songs themselves work temporally is consistently interesting.  “Golden Wounds” opens with twenty-three seconds of near silence, followed by another twenty or so seconds of wind chime like sounds before launching into a minute or so of a bouncingly repetitive guitar hooks and the veiled, mildly creepy repeated lyric “Kiss the fish, kiss the fish, let the poison drip down your lips.”  The last seventeen seconds revert to the wind chime sound.  In a two minute track, fully half of the time is used on blank space or ambient sound.  (I can’t decide if that’s a purposeful statement on what sonic art is or just something that the band thought sounded cool.)  These sonic pauses pop up all over the record.  On the first cut, the stellar and hooky “A Good Dream,” the song stops for nineteen second before restarting.  On the maddeningly catchy “Push,” everything but the bass drops out for some choice cat sounds in the middle of the track.  This experimentation gets the green light from me; it’s kind of ballsy to put the brakes on a song for a second or two (or more), especially given our society’s shortish attention span.

Given the shifting nature of the record, it’s probably not terribly utile to go into the track by track breakdown.  Put this one on and let it play.  Given that restriction, there are a couple of tunes that deserve some highlighting.  Of the more traditional tracks, “Perla” is a quiet acoustic love song that is a total winner; it’s delicate and touching and more powerful for its wedging in between songs that sound nothing like it.  Of the farther out tunes, “Snowflake Heart,” which you can listen to below, gives a solid picture of what’s going on broadly.  Shifts in the time signature, loping lyrics and mildly out of place horns all give a good sense of what you’re in for with Hermit Thrushes.  if you dig this, the rest of the record will be a treat.

“Snowflake Heart” – Hermit Thrushes