Review Summary: post-heartache post-rock
I wish most of my friends were more like
Two Houses. I mean, I’m currently listening to this record in public, and it doesn’t talk over anyone or treat conversation like a way to pass time, using the voices as background drone. This record, more self-effacing than any other post-rock album ever, listens to what others have to say and then internalises those words; using cavernous guitars and sprawling song structures to come to terms with their meaning.
They probably don’t mean a whole lot. Words are fragile, brittle things; shattered by contrary behaviours and muffled by the thick fog of indecision. Kranz protects his lyrics, then, treating them like they’re important but not entirely consequential.
And so it is just these two entities alone: the words -- as fickle as ever -- and the music, playing the therapist both warm and distant for a series of diary entries that hide the specifics behind curtains of subtext (and reverb, for when metaphor lets its guard down). This is an inchoate kind of abreaction, though, because for every patient, mild-mannered passage of music (
Sounds), there is an equally frustrated one; shaking Kranz awake, pulling back the curtains and forcing him into the jagged rays of light (
Careful Now).
But hey, I may have this thing the wrong way around.
Two Houses, all things considered, is slippery and nebulous; hermetic and withdrawn. The music feels occasionally stultified – like little slices of rainy-day suburbia, with that American Beauty kind of dissatisfaction needling away under the surface. From this perspective, it can’t play therapist, because such a tenebrous mindset best not be imposing itself on the people around it. Yet it resigns in the subtlest of ways – the most considerate of ways. With its intangible chord progressions, the record doesn’t scream
fuck this off the side of a cliff-edge, it mutters it repeatedly before falling asleep.
We should let this record in for the sage advice from a withering and put-upon sage; for the realisation that everyone struggles in their own, totally universal way. Borne out of blemishes and bruises and being locked out in the pouring rain, this music seems like the type of catharsis that revels in its own imperfections, breaking down in front of its patients and asserting contradictions at every interval. It’s a lonely helium balloon floating up and up to join the millions of others wandering aimless in the clouds. Let's hope the melancholy doesn’t follow it there.
