Reviewing this record has held me up for a long while. There are reasons for this that have nothing to do with reviewing records, but fundamentally it has been this conundrum: I like Hood a lot, but I didn’t much like the prospect of reviewing Outside Closer, their new album. I really admire what Hood wants to do, and am occasionally in awe of the effectiveness with which they do it. And yet Outside Closer – Hood’s first record in four years – is a step back from 2002’s occasionally magical Cold House, both in terms of success percentage and stylistic scope. It’s not bad, by any stretch – when their songs hit, Hood makes music that sounds like nothing else out there – but this album is inconsistent, slipshod at times and not fully realized. That doesn’t really read as a truly dramatic statement – not much of a condemnation, not a buy-this-immediately freakout – but yet it somehow took me months to get around to writing it.
Part of the holdup was because I don’t know how to do the whole making-music bit, and so feel kind of jerky getting all schoolmarmish on bands that don’t pursue their craft with all the exacting precision I bring to… writing infrequently about their craft for Kevin, and (if I had to pick a second pursuit) recreational drinking. But there’s something about hearing an album that doesn’t feel carefully made that’s kind of maddening. That’s doubly true when, as is the case with Outside Closer, the high points are so remarkably good and the low points feel so blandly autopiloted. The schoolmarmish part is when I wonder why they couldn’t be bothered to buckle down and make a consistent record. It’s not like Hood is some Voltronic British version of 1974 Iggy Pop, throwing up shards of plastic after arriving at the studio sweating quaalude into the tattered tutu they’ve been wearing for five days. They’re a bunch of guys (and a girl) from Leeds, playing around with their equipment and releasing new music every 24-36 months. They’re not no Terror Squad, so what’s up with the intros and outros? And if Hood can make songs as beautiful as the whirring, enveloping “Any Hopeful Thoughts Arrive,” why do they also need to muddle through murky dirges like “End of One Train Running” and “Winter 72,” the comatose buffer between Closer’s two best songs – the aforementioned “Any Hopeful Thoughts” and the staggering “The Lost You,” which really deserves its own sentence. Actually, let’s go with new paragraph.
Right. I suppose the answer to the question that preceded the 150-word sentence up there is that Hood makes uneven records because they’re fallible humans (and, at times, apparently not entirely expert with their technology). They’re not a terribly prolific band, and seldom tour, which leads me to believe that they’re probably working on things in life other than The Next Hood Record. And of course, to offer the standard implicit disclaimer, this is all a matter of taste: you might go for the echo-chamber sub-Dub of “Winter 72;” I might/do think it’s comatose, unfinished, and a little phoned-in. I think we can probably all agree on “The Lost You,” though. It’s another of Hood’s refracted, spiky pop songs, but it builds tremendous momentum and heat as layers wrap around the ghostly chopped-vocal beat that is the song’s foundation. There’s also a Robert Wyatt sample rattling around in there somewhere, and some unexpected but certainly not-unwelcome guitar heroics at the end. Upon a spare foundation, Hood builds something impressively multilayered and undeniably, rudely alive. It’s a great song.
If the whole record were like that… well, that would be really nice. But where Cold House felt fresh and strange – in part because of the contributions from oddball art hip-hop eminences Dose and Why?, and in part because it embodied the sound of a band really finding its voice – Outside Closer feels like a hesitant step towards artistic maturation that either ought to have been taken fully or not taken at all. The songs are produced more cleanly, and Hood chooses not to bury their pop instincts beneath swaths of fuzzy noise. That noise was beautiful, and Hood’s pop instincts are impressive, but too much of Outside Closer catches the band in the middle: the bitterly ruminative album-opening “The Negatives” is perfectly fine, but needs either more hop or more hum; “Still Rain Fell,” which is similarly unobjectionable, doesn’t have the sweep to earn its mucho gusto lead guitar line. Please remember, these are perfectly good songs. But when they’re so close to other, better-realized songs, they’re almost more frustrating than Outside Closer’s actual duds.
And in the context of the jagged brilliance that Cold House had in its best moments, their smoother edges are downright frustrating. A small amount lost, a small amount gained: my perspective as a fan clearly effects my perspective a bit here, but it’s frustrating to have waited four years for that. That said, though, Outside Closer is as good an entry point to the Hood aesthetic as any. This is a distinctive and occasionally brilliant band, and well worth anyone’s time and attention. Outside Closer isn’t their best work, but it’s good work nonetheless, and it’s got a lot to recommend about it. If I could wait four years for a record that isn’t perfect, and Kev could wait three months for a review that isn’t perfect, maybe we can all just accept that (in this context as in others) sometimes good enough is pretty close to good enough. |