1) You Come and I Go; 2) A.M. Slow Golden Hit; 3) Miles Behind Me; 4) I Am a Train; 5) Small Town Shit; 6) What You Meant; 7) Follow Through; 8) Stumblin' Home Winter Blues; 9) Marvelous Truth; 10) The Mumbling Years; 11) Anatole; 12) Motionless; 13) Love to Try
Gentle melodies to warm up with during those cold winter nights. It's one recipe throughout but it's a solid soul food dish.
Key tracks: "A.M. Slow Golden Hit", "I Am a Train", "Follow Through"
As the thunderbolt drummer for Ben Folds Five, Darren Jessee didn't really get to show his songwriter side out much in public, though if you read the credits to the albums you can find him in surprisingly pretty places - "Brick" and "Magic", to name a couple. Following the dissolution of Ben Folds Five, Jessee hung around and about for a while preparing for a solo release, which eventually transformed into Hotel Lights once Jessee recruited some famous friends (both Archers of Loaf drummer Mark Price and Sparklehorse touring guitarist Alan Weatherhead feature as part of the line-up for the debut). If you're only familiar with Ben Folds Five superficially the direction Jessee took might be a surprise but the more you look at his writing credits within the band, the more it makes sense - because Hotel Lights is a placid and pretty songwriter's album.
Jessee described the idea behind the name for Hotel Lights as the duality between the optimism of finally seeing the window lights of your destination hotel at the last stretch of a long drive, and the stark fluorescent lights within the hotel bathroom where "you can see all your scars". Hotel Lights as a band is lot more of the former and very little, if at all, the latter. With a couple of exceptions the thirteen songs that make up the self-titled debut album are gentle ballad-like singer/songwriters tunes, weary and tired but happy and tranquil, with a lot of gently strummed guitars, delicate piano flourishes and synthesizer jolts that can be best described as 'early 2000s'. Jessee as a lead vocalist doesn't have a voice that could belt out a tune, but it's the kind of soft guide that's ideal for the material he specialises in. It's the type of album that finds a natural place in the last hours of a waning evening, blissful but tired and ready to sink into a comforting sound.
You'd think a solid 54 minutes of the same mood and soundscape could get tiring, but between Jessee's admittable gift for a perfectly affable melody and the overwhelmingly atmospheric touch it's a surprisingly strong bunch of songs. Jessee and the crew do break the mold a few times and go for something a bit peppier, but then the album's perkiest cut, the organ-riffing "rocker" "Marvelous Truth" is also the only song here I'd happily cut - between the corny fruity organ and the wuss-rock sound that simply does not suit the band, it's an awkward fit. "I Am a Train" holds the fastest tempo on the record and is a much better fit to the rest of the album, because it takes the general sound and simply utilises its charm in a somewhat more extroverted way, with some lush guitars and moments of gentle explosion that lift the song naturally.
The star of the show are those wistful autumn/winter moments of slow, warm melodies though and while they're not all incredible, the batting average is consistently good and Jessee drops a couple of real hidden classics too. "A.M. Slow Golden Hit" is largely perfect and absolutely nails the weary hope that Jessee aimed for with the band's name, packing an awful lot of poignant atmosphere in its simple form - it's amazing how much you can do with a guitar, some synthetic handclaps and a bunch of additional flourishes. It manages to hit the feeling of nostalgic longing that its lyrics directly reference and the aura of getting lost in an old song that's as familiar as a blood relative (and in 2020 it has become one, natch), and it is absolutely at home when watching the dark roads go by through the car window. "Follow Through" is another clear winner, dedicating a lot of its space for building instrumental sections that lead with a gorgeous organ, and the result is a spellbinding late night anthem where you'd gladly let the last loop go on forever. A number of other stand outs exists - "You Come and I Go", "Small Town Shit", "Stumblin' Home Winter Blues" - but they're largely just different items cut from the exact same cloth: variations on a particularly lovely base recipe of pianos, guitars and lullaby melodies.
Jessee would keep recording more Hotel Lights albums with changing lineups, and I own a few more, but on a brutally honest level the other records haven't really had the longevity of the first one - they are more of the same again and again, just with diminishing returns. The shine of the debut is in part due to despicably personal reasons: there's a lot of references to associations and nostalgia within this review because that's what the album represents to me, having had ordered it from the States back when that was still a novel thing and after already having gotten acquainted with a third of the album through the freebie MP3s shared via the official website, and it vividly takes me back to that period. I also talk about its late night qualities a lot because that's when I found myself listening to it often, headphones on in the dark of my room. But I've owned some of the other Hotel Lights releases for nearly as long and so I'm comfortable enough in saying that Jessee's songwriting is generally the sharpest here and that's why it's stuck around most of all. If Hotel Lights are a bit of a one-trick act, then here on the debut that act is still fresh to impress. Stack it against the records by his former band or its titular star's solo albums and it's likely going to get overshadowed, but Hotel Lights knows its place: it's a comfort food album, welcoming and cosy, and just the right thing for the moments that call for such things.
No comments:
Post a Comment