New music: Houses

August 13, 2013July 25, 2020 The G-Man

Houses show beauty in holocaustal fallout…

Every now and then a track tunnels out of the darkness, belts you in the gut and twists your heart. Think the first tinkling keys of The Cinematic Orchestra and Patrick Watson‘s extraordinary collaboration on ‘To Build A Home’, before Rupert Murdoch got his soul-staining hands on it of course. Echoes of that track reverberate throughout both my ears and heart upon first listen to ‘The Beauty Surrounds’ by Houses.

Taken from Chicagoan duo Dexter Tortoriello and Megan Messina‘s most recent record, A Quiet Darkness is a concept album shaped around the tale of a husband and wife attempting to find each other following some sort of apocalyptic event. As you would expect, some of the words are simply harrowing, none more so than the opening quatrain:

There’s some gold in my bones that I told you about.

So I’m pulling out my teeth and burying them deep under ground.

There’s some lights in your eyes that I follow about.

But they’re dimming quick, and you’re getting sick, so now I wander out alone.

Surprisingly, Pitchfork slammed the long-player in its entirety failing to see that, even if the collection of conceptualized tracks doesn’t set the skyline alight as a whole, ‘The Beauty Surrounds’ may yet be one of the tracks of the year.