Hood
Cold House
[Aesthetics; 2001]
Rating: 8.5
Remember when MTV was still that little renegade music channel? I vividly recall sitting in front of the TV when I was a kid, entranced for hours by Twisted Sister, Def Leppard, and Quiet Riot videos. And though I wasn't entirely sure about what was going on in front of my eyes, I was fascinated all the same. To think that there were places where grown men ran around in make-up and spandex and still managed to kick total rock ass. These were guys that acted completely insane, yet took themselves seriously and were fawned over by women everywhere. As a child, it was like a portal into a strange parallel universe where all of my small town values were inverted.
Then there was the other breed of MTV musician: synth-pop guys who seemed more like real artist types and didn't seem to be concerned as much with making a fantastic testosterone-soaked spectacle of themselves as creating seductive and melodic music. Naked Eyes, Human League, Talk Talk-- they seemed so cutting edge with their Roland synths and electronic drumpads, and the sounds they created were something entirely new, at least to popular music (sorry, I wasn't listening to Brian Eno and Kraftwerk when I was 10).
This was the type of stuff that really interested me. But somewhere along the line, synth-pop began its long estrangement from melody, and electronica began to take over. It started innocuously enough, but soon began incorporating more beat manipulation and studio effects until it was finally twisted into the form known today as IDM. I miss those early days when the technology didn't rule the product, and I think it's time we saw some songwriters doing a little taking back. It's time for a rebirth of synth-pop, wherein all the new innovations in electronic music are employed in the service of melody.
As my posterchild for this movement, I select Hood. (I also accept donations.) Cold House takes a fantastic batch of songs and intelligently mixes in cutting edge electronic elements a la Autechre and Nobukazu Takemura, a couple of west coast underground hip-hop artists, and some delicate backing arrangements, and creates one of the most innovative releases of the past year.
The biggest surprise on Cold House is the guest spots by Anticon MCs Dose-One and Why?. I'm not sure how Hood hooked up with the San Francisco rappers, but their inclusion here was a brilliant decision. The duo's scat lyrics and drum-n-bass delivery really temper the album, preventing it from becoming too soft at points. Chris Hood's lead vocals aren't very inspiring, falling limply somewhere between Badly Drawn Boy and Bernard Sumner, but by mixing in the slit cut vocals, spoken word and psychobabble riffing, a perfect contrast is created between the them.
The album opens promisingly with "They Removed All Trace That Anything Had Happened Here," a nice mix of delicate start/stop clicks, jangly guitar and tasteful cello arrangements. The song splits the vocal sections, starting first with Chris Hood and then handing everything over to Dose-One, who drones over a repeated vocal loop whose compelling nature lies in its unintelligibility. "You Show No Emotion at All" kicks off with an unimaginative scratchy beat, but soon picks up with nice trumpet and keyboard fills, revealing itself as the strongest track on the album that strictly features Hood's own vocals.
"With Branches Bare" thrives on a distended drone that sounds clipped straight from Depeche Mode's Violator. Halfway through, Dose-One hops in with his nasal tone and surreal lyrics: "We spit in the pond to give the fish something to pray to/ Sometimes the sunset doesn't want to be photographed/ We are no tigers in the picked-bone grasslands." But the album's standout comes with the closing track, "You're Worth the Whole World." It's sung entirely by Dose-One over a low-mixed spoken track, a simple picked guitar progression, and hushed horn keyboards that lead in from the melancholy preceding track, "Lines Low to a Frozen Ground."
There are some misses in the middle of the album, like "The River Curls Around This Town," a track that, while never really amounting to much, does end with some nice, richly atmospheric electronic gamelan sounds. Indeed, all of the tracks on Cold House-- even the weaker ones-- contribute something of interest. Take, for instance, "I Can't Find My Brittle Youth," which might amount to little more than filler if not for the machine gun drumming that comes out of nowhere and closes the track like John Bonham at 78rpm.
Since their inception in 1994, Hood haven't been able to make up their minds what kind of band they want to be. Over the course of their past four albums (not to mention their countless singles, EPs, compilation appearances, remix records, and collections), they've jumped indecisively from genre to genre, experimenting with shoegazer, straightforward indie rock, slowcore, and lo-fi. But with Cold House, Hood seem to have finally stumbled into a sound all their own, melding their countless influences into something totally unique and, at last, giving music fanatics and critics worldwide a reason to look forward to their future releases. Let's hope the payoff is this good next time around.
-Nathan Rooney, January 10th, 2002
Hood
Outside Closer
[Domino; 2005]
Rating: 8.6
Each Hood album seems to contain at least one single whose first minute sounds like the work of a band that is poised to take over the world, a casually brilliant combination of living-room sound and electronic future-think that trounces everything you've heard in months. This time around it's a track called "The Lost You": An airy shard of a sample stutters and slices itself open into a big, lurching beat, the vocal comes muttering modestly in along with it, and by the time the song fleshes itself out into a chorus you're wide-eyed and wondering why every band can't be this carelessly awesome. It's at moments like this that Hood seems like the greatest thing ever: A band making the kind of Serious Innovative Music people like to imagine Radiohead are, only without a hint that they know or care that they're doing it at all. String together a tight, accessible collection of glorious moments like this, and there's hardly a critic on either side of the Atlantic who wouldn't clamor to cast these guys as the new saviors of music.
Only there's a catch: That's not really the kind of band this is. It's not that a track like "The Lost You" is so different from the rest of their work-- and it's not that there's anything about the songs around it that's sub-par-- it's just that they're really not interested in glory. Recent Hood recordings have less to do with grand pop gestures than with the kind of wandering pastoralia perfected by the Bristol act Movietone: Sometimes they just want to camp out in a room with acoustic guitar and violin and delay pedals and see how a song crawls into shape on its own. Instead of big-budget drama, Hood are reminiscent of the drifting sound-paintings of Bark Psychosis, Disco Inferno, or Slowdive's final record. Sometimes the song framework takes a back seat to letting dense arrangements of guitar and piano echo around one another.
Hood's previous full-length, Cold House, still made gestures toward crisp, cohesive pop, but Outside Closer gets pretty comfortable with the feeling of sprawl. The result is a whole load of cold-sun-on-moors, last-leaves-on-the-tree material. But what's remarkable is that instead of sounding autumnal and frigid, the bulk of this album has a warmth, an emotional weight, and a sense of underlying motion that competes damn well against the occasional fireworks. Some of these pleasures may be subtle or take time to grasp, but the sinking-in is gorgeous and worth the wait.
This, in fact, may be as good as Hood have ever been at letting songwriting and sprawl play off of one another-- even though their electronic tweaks back away and the violin takes a larger role. You'd still need the mind of a musicologist to be able to hum some of these wandering melodies and sleepy English mumbles, but that doesn't make them any harder to take in: Even the most lethargic of them-- seven minutes of slow burn on "Closure" and "Any Hopeful Thoughts Arrive"-- gradually gather into something narrative, ballads recast in an impressionist haze.
When they aim for shape, there's still the same sense of variation and sprawl around the edges: The terrific "The Negatives" weaves samples, strings, and acoustics into a fine-tuned depth that's almost reminiscent of the Church, but it flows along according to a logic that's anything but conventional. What's most striking here depends on what you're in it for. "Still Rain Fell" is a big pastoral wash of acoustic guitars and violin melody that casts this band as a set of sophisticated pop songwriters-- this is the kind of relaxed, languorous sound that makes it feel like Hood are conceiving their material late at night in someone's living room. On the other hand, there are "Winter 72"-- which actually does cross into the dubbed-out full-band headspace of Bark Psychosis-- and "This is It, Forever", which reduces the whole band into a momentary sound-art mutter.
It's unknown whether or not that title is a hint the band is going to call it a day. This Leeds collective has been floating through various kinds of gorgeousness for just over a decade, more or less improving with every release; they've also already tried breaking up, but without success. It's not really clear whether that mutter of a send-off genuinely marks the end for Hood, but if it does, this record is a bit of a conflicted curtain: A captivatingly strong release that still leaves you wondering if these guys have a world-conquering album somewhere inside them.
-Nitsuh Abebe, January 21, 2005
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