1) Midnight Train; 2) Truckin'; 3) Knife in the Back; 4) Fours; 5) The Hunter; 6) The Moviegoer; 7) Nagasaki Shuffle; 8) The Searchers; 9) Burn With Me
Rough around the edges but full of promise and some great songs - a good entrance that could and should have been the first step towards something special.
Key tracks: "Midnight Train", "Fours", "Burn With Me"
My formative music-obsessive teenager years coincided with the rapid rise of internet as a tool for any bedroom and garage act to release their music to a wider audience, which was a fantastic thing. MySpace was the vital centre of any new and budding act, and every now and then you ended up discovering something really great: as a naive teenager I hoped and prayed for labels to pick up those demo acts I bumped into so that I could hear the acts blossom, only to be disappointed time and time again on the realisation that those demos were likely the only thing I’d ever hear from them. With the demise of MySpace, for many of the young hopefuls posting their music there all of it's gone now, save for some lucky few individuals who have held onto the files on their hard drives.
I discovered Squirrelhouse through MySpace obviously and I've gone into more detail about it in my review for Friends, a retrospective collection of demos for their tentative second album which was never fully realised. Those demos were what drew me to Squirrelhouse to begin with and got me excited for the future, but unfortunately I wasn't able to visit their past: despite my interest for the quietly released debut album SPQR, it was completely unattainable to someone across several big ponds without a credit card. SPQR remained as little more than a name in my memory until many, many, many years later, when my adult self finally bought what the teenager couldn’t. By that time Squirrelhouse had been quietly long buried and even though Friends had seen the light of day by that point, SPQR is the only full-fledged, “real” album that Squirrelhouse ever released - a feat many young bands of that era never reached, which is why it’s even more of a shame why it’s been buried in history.
The vision that SPQR builds is of a band full of talent but who are still learning the ropes. It's very of its time - post-Funeral, US indie had started to expand its sound and reach wider heights and Squirrelhouse are following up on that, traces of its peers all across its nine songs. Boy-girl vocals, anthem build-ups, heightened urgency and passion, and arrangements beyond the standard rock band set (mostly in form of the horn player who's part of the band's permanent fixture and really works wonders throughout the songs) are all familiar from other parts of the era, but that's fine. One, it's a great sound and it caters for my endless nostalgia but more importantly, Squirrelhouse never sound like they're imitating. It's the kind of debut where the influences are still showing up, but you can tell they're on their way for something unique - which Friends would then realise. If anything, on SPQR the band still aren't entirely certain what they want to be, and dabble across different paths. There's only nine songs and while there's a thin running thread through them, there's a good amount of variety within them, from the more no-nonsense rock of "The Searchers" and "Truckin'" to "Midnight Train", "Knife in the Back" and "Nagasaki Shuffle", which are most reminiscent of the energy, enthusiasm and shout-along hooks that this era is most associated with, and with a little extra polish could have become surefire festival audience pleasers. The most whiplash is brought on by the anxious, riff-heavy push of "The Hunter" and the slacker melodies of "The Moviegoer": while not among the album's best, Squirrelhouse are versatile enough to pull them off and "The Hunter" in particular gets pretty powerful by its furious finale.
The best cuts, though, are the ones that directly point the path forward. The stop-start groove of "Fours" and the increasingly intensifying "Burn With Me" show signs of the ideas that the band would go on to explore with the direction for their second album, with more fluid song structures, more emphasis on the rhythm section leading the way forward and the more intricate melodic arrangements. Both are full of promise, but still more importantly are also really great songs, rough spots and all. For a budding fan, they're the sort of things that whet your appetite for the future; for a band, they're the kinds of songs you put your everything into, to push you into the wider light.
I'm obviously viewing this through multiple layers of retrospective evaluation, and while I bang on about this band being a lost treasure of sorts, I don't think SPQR would have been quite enough on its own to secure that "legacy". It's a good record, with plenty of reasonably strong highlights and you already have the band's own, unique personality showing through. It's also a little rough, occasionally unfocused and the band haven't quite yet fully grasped their own strengths yet. It's exactly the sort of record you show around to your friends in hopes of building up some form of grassroots buzz, idealistically declaring these guys are going to be something to watch out for in the future, just imagine what they could do next. And then, well. If you're a sucker for that mid-late 00s indie sound and desperately need more, SPQR is a good shout - and thanks to the now-also-closed CDBaby and their automatic upload system, the songs continue to have some presence across modern services for those who search for them - but it's also a great example of a debut release which shines with, above all, promise. As probably the number one (and only? To this day, I’m not sure if anyone else remembers them even if they have a few hundred potentially historic listeners on Last.FM) fan of the band these days I heartily recommend it - but it's Friends that really demonstrates why I still think about Squirrelhouse and still wistfully sigh that the promises brought by SPQR never realised fully.
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