The Very Hush Hush’s first full length, Mourir C’est Facile (Dying is Easy), is insidiously visceral music which leaves behind nothing concrete: no melodies, no catchy turn of phrase. Instead, after carrying you along as if on waves, it deposits you on shore with vague impressions which prevent you from standing on firmer ground. It is like the hour after waking when you try to grasp at the slippery edges of dreams you had considered so vivid. Classically trained pianists, Grant Hazard Outerbridge and Peter Bo Rappmund, formerly from Denver and now based in Oakland, have created an album that is also difficult to talk about without slipping into abstraction and describing the work as a whole rather than its specific tracks.
In an interview with Denver lit/art magazine Syntax, the band revealed that its name was partly borne out of an Emmy-nominated episode of the cult favorite TV show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer where the inhabitants of Buffy’s town cannot speak, their voices stolen by monsters. The episode, entitled “Hush,” is remarkable not only for the dramatic substance within its lack of verbalization and use of musical accompaniment, but for the utterly creepy atmosphere which is conjured.
It’s an apt connection. Listening to Mourir C’est Facile is like being in a thick fog or a heavy snow, the same sort of loaded, eerie quiet where things seem utterly still and yet unrelentingly moving. You lose track of the tracks and the words fade in and out in a fuzz, existing more for their sound than their definitions, a sense both lulling and frustrating as hearing the murmur of a language you haven’t quite mastered.
The album rolls in slowly on the short introductory track ¬¬– almost as if from the point of view of a ghost: “I can see forever from here…” – and builds nicely throughout the first half (tracks 1-4 are grouped under the title “long live the new flesh” and 5-10 “lighting will guide you”) only to lose some effectiveness in the second. At their best, TVHH captures both elements of catchy electro-pop and sweeping symphonic washes, with a wide range of dynamics filtered through the hush of fuzziness and dependence on high-hat and cymbal crashes. At times, the music veers into more traditional rock territory that, when successful, is a bit like glimpses of sun on a cloudy day, and otherwise falls a bit flat, the sound dully swamped with not enough room for air.
It’s not all heaviness, though. Dying isn’t so very easy with this current underneath the music pulsing and driving. There’s still that haze of the sun and slow-fast buzz from the wine and the life that is but a dream.
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