Review Summary: Dude, Where's My (indie rock)?
NOTE: This review was submitted as part of the REVIEW A RANDOM ALBUM 2026.
There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to explain this album. It’s not a malicious thought, don’t get me wrong. And it’s certainly not as a means of hyping the sounds of an album from 2007 that, at best, floated in some weird liminal space between the misappropriated genre tags spanning the racks of CDs at your local FYE. It’s not unrealistic that some guy at some point in time picked up Houseguest’s album, High Strangeness, and thought to himself, “why is this sludge metal album sitting next to Hedley? But then the whole section is a friggin’ mess,” he continues, “so I’m not stupid to assume that this poor Houseguest got displaced and rehomed far away from the sludge and the doom; away from the section where the scent of sun-bleached serapes lingered like the liquid haze of a Mexican summer.” So, with the same sort of sad happiness that comes with taking home a shelter cat, he walks out of FYE with a bag filled with misguided expectations.
Assumptions make asses of us all, don’t they? On its face, this album–with its color-penciled cover of a large eye staring out from a mountain of accumulated boulders across a rocky desertscape towards some unseen subject–should be about UFOs and saucers, multi-dimensional shenanigans, or Mothman and his pet Chupacabra. Instead, the album is a similar-sounding collection of indie rock ideas, communicated with an energy and enthusiasm and a vocal theatricality that saves it from feeling tedious. There’s a certain openness to the record, a notion that the band feels unshackled from expectations or critical judgment. The type of easy-going indie tunes that simmer in fuzz and snare rolls. It’s a little punk and a little surf n’ turf. Songs like “Are We Us?” or “Galapaghost Island” are bursts of playful energy, propelled by excellent drumming and twiddly-dwiddly fretwork. Other songs, such as “Muted Mesa” slow things down and endear themselves a bit more with the listener, constructing little stories within a more tightly composed song. One can’t help but hear The Weakerthans offering spiritual guidance at times as the band flirts with the more familiar sounds and intentions of mid-2000s indie rock.
High Strangeness, then, is not so strange at all. At 14 tracks clocking in at less than 40 minutes, there may not be a whole lot to sink one’s teeth into. There are a handful of delights to be found and you’ll at times be swept up in the unseriousness of it all. It’s light on variation and the formula on display results in a homogenous set of songs that struggle to separate themselves from one another, although there are some exceptions such as those listed above. But, just like the FYEs of yesteryear, Houseguest’s album comes and goes without significant fanfare. Most songs lack identity and those that do work are pastiches of better songs from better artists.
