The Babies - Our House On The Hill
Label.........................: Woodsist
Genre.........................: Indie
StoreDate.....................: Nov-13-2012
Source........................: CDDA
Grabber.......................: Exact Audio Copy (Secure Mode)
Encoding Scheme...............: Lame 3.98.4 V0 VBR Joint-Stereo
Size..........................: 64.13 MB
Total Playing Time............: 35:10
Release Notes:
My first inkling that Our House on the Hill would find the Babies
offering something of a middle-ground between country music and their
debut's kinetic garage rock came in January, at Downtown Manhattan's
storied Clocktower Gallery. There I watched them perform on the occasion
of a Western-themed multimedia exhibit, "Canyon Candy", which included
cacti, a coyote, and audio samples of yodeling. The band, fronted by
Woods bassist Kevin Morby alongside Vivian Girls' Cassie Ramone, played
with a projection of the 1984 drama Paris, Texas, and for a portion of
the set Morby wore a cowboy hat.
While the Babies' first record pushed lines on mortality and social
anxiety through a compressed, grainy filter, Hill feels more open and
vital. The Babies' warm fuzz, captured at Woods' Rear House Studios,
tended to mask the album's greatest asset-- its lyrics. Proper polish
from an L.A. studio has cleared that up, and they've added an array of
instrumental flourishes without straining too hard for maturity. Here,
the Babies bend an ear towards Jimmie Rodgers, Everly Brothers, and Lee
Hazlewood, along with Southern blues and gospel ("Lord"-summoning
abound). Morby can be an expert storyteller as he waxes existential and
sings tales of subterranean danger, slippery romance, drunken rebels; he
variously offers funny colloquialisms or cutting desolation. We're left
with a dense caricature of American counterculture, in constant movement
towards dreams, thrills, or vice.
Take the criminally infectious "Mess Me Around", which chronicles the
dead-end aftermath of an ill-fated encounter with illusory tricksters.
"I dreamt of the hell to come, if I didn't wake up and run," Morby sings
with escalating, tongue-in-cheek paranoia, his corrupted character
"swimming in a pool of blood" while "straining at the Texas sun." The
scenario takes the fictionalized outlaw ballad to an absurd extreme. Who
knows why the roughnecks did Morby in, but by nature there's amusement
to be found with pistol-pointing rebels and their disregard of
mainstream morale. Similarly liberated, "Alligator" puts forth a
loveless character with no job to pay rent; here Morby also works in
what Lester Bangs called "the Lou Reed 'I walked to the chair/ Then I
sat in it' school of lyrics," dispassionately offering, "Life is funny/
Life's a laugh/ Life is lonely/ It's a drag," celebrating the multitudes
before a light-hearted turn: "I like your hair/ How do ya do it?"
Hill, then, can be unpredictably humorous. The call-and-response of
"Chase It to the Grave" spouts a wry hillbilly line about falling in a
ditch, centered on the archetypically American conquest of achieving
one's dream. Conversely, the spooked and angry "Moonlight Mile"-- title
culled from the road-weary 1971 Stones ballad-- chugs onward with a
defeated promise of freedom, at a troubled site where the sky's limits
are closed and dreams are broken. Morby's enraged narrator, a Billy the
Kid-type "soul-slinger", is self-reliant in his pursuit of railroad
escape: "And that's the train that I'm on/ If you don't want on, then
get off/ It's just who I am." When he finally stares us down, wondering
if our train's got direction-- "What train are you traveling on? Is it
lost into the dark?"-- it sounds profound.
Morby's just as strong a popsmith when taking on simple matters; a
fed-up late-night question of lust on the trotting "Get Lost", or "On My
Teams"s lovelorn yearning. But Ramone's easy "baby baby" rhymes pale in
comparison to the lyrical ambition found across the record, as does the
lackadaisical "See the Country", which tries at making a poem of the
majestic American landscape. And while Morby's acoustic "Mean" gets at
the universal feeling of wanting the annoying kid at the party to shut
the fuck up-- individualism needs skepticism-- it's too precious.
Other tracks in straight singer-songwriter mode are easy highlights.
"Wandering" reflects on leaving home and the romantic notion of being
born anew-- America's primary fantasy-- with a lonely stillness that
treads passion and tension. Morby stretches out the song's epiphany--
"Become-- what? Become-- what? Become who you are"; it's an especially
apt topic for 2012, as internet culture insists on connections to the
burdensome past and hinders self-reinvention. Meanwhile "That Boy" is a
harrowing strummer in the form of a traditional blues ballad, with
piercing inner demons: "My best friend died/ Don't you see?/ His mother
came and lied down next to me." The verse, overpowering and raw, leads
into some terrifyingly human poetry: "Sometimes I get so scared that I
can't breathe/ And the ground moves right out from beneath my feet/ And
the sky's hanging low to the trees." It's not hard to see why.
Since forming in 2008, the Babies have had a trying time escaping the
context of Vivian Girls, Woods, and the questions of "lo-fi" those
groups still curiously carry. But songs like "That Boy" offer a more
illuminating origin story; Babies were born following the death of a
mutual bandmate and friend. The backstory appears between the sunshine
ripchords of their debut "Meet Me in the City" single, cutting its New
York romanticism with funereal descriptions of "a church cross town,"
hospital walls, shitty feelings. These songs emphasize the band's
emotional capabilities. Though imperfect, Hill's intensifying sonic
clarity presents the Babies as a group that still believes in
rock'n'roll as a powerful language, one that can help sort out mortal
complexities and say something about the way we live.
-- 7.8/10 Pitchfork
Tracklisting
01. Alligator 2:13
02. Slow Walkin 3:01
03. Mess Me Around 2:15
04. Get Lost 3:19
05. Baby 2:54
06. Mean 3:04
07. On My Team 2:28
08. Moonlight Mile 2:30
09. See The Country 3:03
10. That Boy 3:45
11. Chase It To The Grave 3:24
12. Wandering 3:14
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