REVIEW: Trees Take Ease - Something Waffle This Way Yums...

Laura Kerry

Stephen Becker calls the songs on Something Waffle This Way Yum... “miniatures.” As Trees Take Ease, Becker has put out a few EPs of experimental bedroom music in recent years that range from strange, dreamy abstraction to strange, dreamy stories. Something Waffle falls on the narrative end of the spectrum, painting little portraits of the artist’s life as intimate as the designation “miniature” suggests.

As a paintbrush for these miniatures, the one-man band mostly uses tools with which he can be precise: his voice and an acoustic guitar. Throughout the album, Becker covers a wide swath of musical territory with them. Sometimes, his guitar sounds classical, moving dexterously through trills and arpeggios until the baroque melodies collapse into off-kilter, dissonant moments of experimentation (“Water Flower,” “Ninety in the Shade”). At other times, the guitar sounds plainly folky, as in the pretty and warm picking pattern on “Daytime Blues.” Though Something Waffle is, for the most part, a duet between a voice and a guitar, it occasionally sounds like something much fuller. Song such as “Beanie Baby,” “Quietude,” and “Inside Joke” resemble other genres—art rock, post-punk—that have been stripped down to their skeletons. You can imagine what would fill in the generous spaces in the music.

While the compositions shift, Becker’s voice remains fairly consistent throughout the 12 tracks on the album. In addition to “miniatures,” the artist has found other apt words to describe his art—“shyguy,” “naptime,” and “heartsong”—all of which reflect in his singing. His voice is delicate and subdued, but not without expression. With the right mix of guitar supporting him (in “Open Arms” and “Daytime Blues,” for example), Becker’s muted and somber voice sounds like Elliott Smith’s.

That comparison functions beyond Trees Take Ease’s vocals. Self-deprecating and raw, the overarching sentiment on Something Waffle is a sad one. He sings: “Truth be told you probably would avoid me” (“Daytime Blues”); “Cool how the thing you love must turn around to haunt you” (“Blue”); and “Save me from pulling out my hair” (“Open Arms”). Much of the album has this confessional feel, as if capturing scrawled thoughts on paper in a letter or diary.

But as the album title establishes, Something Waffle This Way Yums… has a sense of humor, too. Some of the most delightful moments on the album come in the form of small stories that are funny for their ordinariness. “Beanie Baby,” for example, is an ode to a hat (“My same old crap is easier to bear when I’m underneath my off-grey beanie”). “Favorite Song,” we learn at the end, portrays the mundane dialogue of an okay first date (“What’s your favorite song? / Hopefully I like it / Also your last name? / It’s getting kinda warm /But not enough to bike out / To my Planet Fitness). It’s the miniature portraits like these that make Trees Take Ease’s work equal measures strange and charming. Something Waffle is a particular album that won’t suit every moment, but will be magical in the times that it does.

REVIEW: Gorgeous Bully - Holsten

Kelly Kirwan

Gorgeous Bully's name and sound both revel in opposites. On one side are smooth edges and a welcoming symmetry—on the other, a clenched fist, a few ruffled feathers, and a willingness to strike and sting. It’s the sort of ironic, contradictory name that does well in teasing the band’s personality. Their latest EP, Holsten, chugs along with the staccato head-bang of punk, and the stripped-down facets of bedroom pop. These two elements are held tautly together throughout Gorgeous Bully’s sound, which somehow manages to be both gritty and easy listening.

Holsten is an array of six concise and condensed tracks, with the longest song, "autoimmune," clocking in at just over three minutes. It begins with a deep, rumbling bass and rich resonance, as a healthy dose of distortion adds a pixelated edge to their chord arrangements. "What will they say?” we hear, as if it’s spoken through a megaphone, a call to action that’s just barely more than nonchalant. He toys with the word, repeating it twice, before arriving at the crux of it all: “What will they say when you’re gone?” Is it a genuine musing, or a threat? Towards the end, Gorgeous Bully sings, “You’ll be all right…” as the guitar lines become more frayed, an abrupt finish cutting off the track entirely. 

Then there’s the album’s closer, "can’t explain," which rolls together like a series of run-on sentences, opening with, “I was feeling strange that evening / Think it’s something I can’t explain / Birds were singing / I was drinking / Feeling something I can’t explain.” The way the vocals rise and fall, the half-rhyme of the lyrics, and the subdued grumble of the instruments come together in a way that’s hypnotic. Just under two minutes, it’s a personal favorite off Holsten, capturing that feeling of surreal detachment that comes from too much introspection. The track, and the EP as a whole, will leave you swimming in rich reverberations and songs that sink in instantly.

VIDEO REVIEW: Squirrel Flower - Daylight Savings

Kelly Kirwan

An empty yellow chair sits in a field of neatly pressed and plowed hay, the introductory focal point of Ella Williams' latest video, "Daylight Savings." Slipping into her musical persona, Squirrel Flower, Williams lures us into landscapes that should be overwhelmingly mundane—dreary, even, with a hint of ennui. But there’s something subtly unusual that has our eyes transfixed, a dream that bears too much resemblance to our everyday, leaving a hangover of the surreal.

“I know it’s daylight savings, dear / But I can’t sleep,” Williams sings, her voice both delicate and resonantly powerful, making her lyrics elegant and enrapturing. Intermittently we see Williams draped across the yellow chair, staring into the lens of the camera, a bouquet of white flowers in her hands. Predominantly though, we see two women, alternately standing side by side in the field and the purple lighting of a nondescript room. They move in tandem, their languid choreography evocative of modern dance. In the intertwining shots that feature Williams, she's standing on a bed, strumming her guitar, or her silhouette is outlined dimly on a wall, a loose arrangement of flowers part of her shadowy profile.

Williams is a bit of an enigma in this video, her face either looking off-camera or set in a contemplative expression that's difficult to read. She’s a mystery you find yourself leaning in to understand, trying to get a grasp on her crystalline voice as she sings, “I know we’ve gained an hour / But it feels like I’ve lost two.” "Daylight Savings" is a song of slight disorientation, the bending of time, that we simply assign to the natural change of seasons. An unsteadiness that we welcome, and hell, by the end of the song, crave.

VIDEO PREMIERE: Grubby Little Hands - No Such Thing

Laura Kerry

Grubby Little Hands’ music video for “No Such Thing” is many things at different times. In the quiet build-up marked by the fade-in of voices and a slide guitar, the camera creeps up on a large stone house, looking ominous in a blue-tinted filter. Then, as the door to the house opens, both the song and shot brighten. A dancing woman sporting shorts and sunglasses, appropriate for the jangly tune that has emerged, leads the camera as she dances away, suggesting a lighthearted, party-themed video. From there, though, “No Such Thing” takes several delightfully strange turns, introducing an unexpected cast of characters, passing off a lip-sync among several idiosyncratic scenes, and dissolving into psychedelic effects.

From last year’s Garden Party—also an unexpected ride through bright pop, grungy psych, silliness, and seriousness—the video is the event that the album’s title suggests. In “No Such Thing,” Grubby Little Hands invites you to mingle among ‘60s-style go-go dancers, a cheerleader and a jock, a skateboarder, a painter on a pool table, and a baby wearing a shawl in a summery party that you won’t want to leave.

REVIEW: Camp Howard - Juice EP

Laura Kerry

Richmond, Virginia-based Camp Howard take their name from a place that holds special significance for much of the group. Three out of four members of the band—Nic Perea, Wes Parker, and Brian Larson—have known each other since they were 14 (Matt Benson joined the band later), and their music reflects the chemistry that comes from playing and drinking beers by a Virginia river together for a long time.

In their new EP, Juice, released on Egghunt Records, Camp Howard lives up to the summery vibe implied by their name. And anytime the image of beers on a river and a group of college-aged dudes arises, the term “slacker” is sure to follow close behind. With their sometimes-jangly, sometimes-fuzzy guitars leading their indie rock and post-punk sound, Camp Howard does brush up against slackerdom, but their precision and smoothness stop them from going beyond its edges. There's no attempt to disguise the fact that Juice is a thoughtful and polished effort.

One of the most polished elements of the EP is the vocals. Even in the most punk-heavy tracks, like “Fucked Up,” “Country,” and “I Will,” the singer’s voice is smooth and dulcet. Camp Howard has a knack for using harmonies in a number of different contexts to wildly different effects. In “Haircut,” the opener with a jangly guitar and magnetic beat, the sunny harmonies recall The Beach Boys. On “Juice,” a song adapted from an electronic version, the touches of male-female duet sound both sweet and unconventional as they sing, “I will always be yours.” In “Fucked Up,” they add drama to a driving, post-punk chorus, and in on the bridge in “Country,” they lend a pretty respite that resembles Grizzly Bear amid an otherwise intense, fast-paced song.

While the vocals remain consistently pretty and refined, the sounds shift around them. Though they employ the same instruments throughout, the percussion ranges from groovy and sharp in “Haircut” to explosive and propulsive in “Fucked Up”; guitars span from bright and open on “Mismo” to grinding and aggressive on “Country”; and other voices emerge surprisingly—a spacey synth in “Country,” a tambourine on “Juice.” Themes switch from being too drunk to have sex (“Fucked Up”) to political action (“Country”) to wanting someone who has left (“I Will”). Even languages vary, changing from English to Spanish in “Mismo.” Each of these variations resembles a familiar sound—beach-pop, post-punk, pop-punk, to name a few—with a bit of added experimentation. They do each of those styles well, though, making them their own.

In Juice, Camp Howard shows their range as musicians, songwriters, and performers of breezy rock. The only thing left to do is grab a beer, relax, and enjoy the EP.