Horse Feathers. House With No Home

[September 3rd, 2008]

It feels positively incongruous to be listening to the music of Horse Feathers on a warm, sunny day. If there’s ever been a sound perfectly suited to the gray, slick and muted colors of a Portland autumn, it can be found on the band’s stunning 2006 debut, Words Are Dead—and on House with No Home, its even more contemplative and beautiful follow-up. Listen closely underneath the handpicked guitar and buttery voice of frontman Justin Ringle and you might detect the spatter of raindrops or the crackle of a fire.

Not that you should limit your listening of House to six months of the year only—the album sounds just as good now as it will in December—but there’s a particular mood the album wants to evoke, one that usually settles in when temperatures start dropping. Horse Feathers captures this spirit by moving through each song with a deliberate, unhurried pace, coaxing warm, gentle melodies out of its chosen instruments. This is especially true of the string work provided by Ringle’s brother-and-sister bandmates, Heather and Peter Broderick.

The Brodericks are the band’s secret sibling weapons, providing moments of haunting discordance on “Heathen’s Kiss” and delicate beauty on the heartbreaking “Different Gray.” Elsewhere, in the magisterial tracks “Albina” and “A Burden,” the strings affect a baroque timber that provides a stunning counterpoint to Ringle’s country-folk picking.

This isn’t to say that the band is trying to alienate its listeners with high-minded musicianship. Rather, the trio’s understanding of composition has helped create a deceptively complex piece of work. Each song on the album feels like it was methodically constructed over piles of sheet music, but it is played with the offhand grace that only preternaturally talented musicians like these have access to. Just listen to the banjo, guitar and string parts snake in and around each other on “Working Poor” and marvel at how smoothly it all goes down.