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Musical familiarity can breed contempt, even if it’s the familiar pick-up put-down pleasures of throwaway indie-pop, a genre as vague as it is defined and with enough generic similarities that the potential for complacent listening underlines the mantra of never judging a download by iTunes’ genre list.
The Hush Now is one such band that risk suffering at the hands of genre based assumptions, assumptions that in part may be of their own making in the form of ‘Contrails’, an average been there heard that album opener that isn’t representative of the remaining nine tracks.
Relative newcomers the Bostonian quintet has been described as many things but thankfully have yet to succumb to the allure of expectant buzzwords littering their introductory reviews. In essence, despite the opening track and in a folly of sweeping statement, the jangling guitars, chirpy keyboards, baggy vocals and imaginary bowl-cut fringes sound in perfect indie-pop order.
And despite the church organ reverence, running bass, straight up operatic interlude, Mexican brass and unfolding (you’ve guessed it) indie-pop excellence of ‘Hoping And Waiting’, all is not what it seems and as far as debuts go theirs is pretty special and not as easily defined.
A slow burner ‘Constellations’ pivots on the nasally distinctive and at times near monotonic vocals of Noel Kelly, subtle whispered harmonies, knowing when and when not to give guitar and keyboards prominence and maybe most importantly an absolute reliance on Barry Marino’s innate and inventive drumming.
A far cry from the back-alley disappointments of an indie-pop knee-trembler, ‘Constellations’ facilitates an outpouring of lovelorn confessionals; ‘Thorns’, ‘Smokescreens’ and ‘I Saw You First’ dealing more with requited reality than carefree daydreams and the lucid backseat nuances of ‘Fireflies’, ‘Misanthrope’ and ‘Carousel’ keeping woe is me whimsy at arms length.
Familiarity can breed contempt, but it’s hard to be contemptible of a band, whose fantastic debut is played out in an unnecessary yet uncomfortable state of stifled embarrassment far from the reassuring complacency that throwaway indie-pop so often provides.
