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Jordan Krinsky came up in the 2010s rubbing elbows with now-canonical Philly artists like Alex G and Spirit of the Beehive. But after college, the frontman of How Strange It Is moved to Portland—sight unseen—in 2015.
“It was pretty jarring moving here and going from having all the community that I had on the East Coast to not knowing anyone,” Krinsky says. “Part of what got me to this specific place was that challenge, the growing pain of figuring out adulthood.”
Krinsky’s music with How Strange It Is finds a middle ground between his formative Philly influences and the noisy, guitar-heavy milieu of post-lockdown Portland rock. The band’s new album, There Is No Evil, evokes both Alex G’s hushed indie-rock balladry and Spirit of the Beehive’s electronically enhanced shoegaze. But it’s also in line with what’s been going on in recent years in the Portland rock scene, where acts like Growing Pains, Guitar and Alien Boy have emphasized volume and startling sound design.
There Is No Evil, the band’s second album, was inspired by the community Krinsky built for himself. Krinsky’s house, lovingly dubbed the “Rainforest Cafe” by members of the local music scene, has hosted live bands, poetry readings, puppet shows and even weddings.
“Having a home be a third space, connected to not just the local scene but the extended universe of music in the country, has ended up being a really powerful driver for me,” Krinsky says. “Not just to make music, but to build a community around it.”
Yet living at the Rainforest Cafe, which is located in an economically depressed area of North Portland, also inspired the album’s theme.
Opener “EVL” finds Krinsky looking out his front door at Interstate 5, surveying the hostile architecture and infrastructural decay and concluding, “There’s evil out there.”
“There’s a lot of disparity,” Krinsky says. “It’s hard to ignore when you see it every day.”
Lead single “Slime” contrasts the comfort of those living in homes like the Rainforest Cafe with the lives of those huddling under overpasses just a few hundred feet away. The music plays up the juxtaposition. Quiet and hooky verses alternate with a grinding, almost heavy-metal chorus that sounds like urban decay made tangible: Krinsky’s guitars and distortion as an illustration of a broken America, where slime bubbles up from river depths and rising sea levels sweep away highways.
How Strange It Is isn’t Krinsky’s first Portland band; he and drummer Kyle Gordon first played in a more emo-leaning group called Wavering before joining with singer-songwriter Annie Fifer in a band called Yellow Room. All three are now in How Strange It Is, alongside bassist Annie Miranda and multi-instrumentalist Caleb Ballard.
The band’s self-titled EP came out in 2022, featuring songs written by Krinsky during the pandemic-era doldrums and fleshed out by various roommates and band members to be. In the Light of the Blistering Moon, the band’s debut, came out the following year.
Blistering Moon is much more ornate than There Is No Evil, closer to what you’d expect upon encountering the band’s name, which refers to the title track from Neutral Milk Hotel’s junkyard-baroque opus In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. To realize his “maximalist” vision for the album, Krinsky recruited Ballard to play woodwinds.
“Then it was like, well, you’re going to play clarinet; you should play some guitar and some other of these fun auxiliary parts,” Ballard says. “That led into doing a few short van tours together, and then I was like, OK, I’m really in How Strange It Is now.”
You could also call the new album a straightforward rock record in comparison with the filigreed sound of Blistering Moon—but it’s a straightforward rock record with room for bizarre detours like the goblin voices that abruptly end the sub-two-minute “Holladay Park.”
How Strange It Is isn’t the only Portland band to experience a back-to-basics shift on their latest music. Last week, WW profiled Growing Pains (“Teenage Love Songs,” Oct. 14), another Portland band whose sound trends toward swirly digital shoegaze but who stripped things ever so slightly back on their new album, Daniel Loves Mandy Forever. The local indie-rock scene appears to be arcing towards volume and away from the post-Shins image of the city as a wilderness of unamplified beardos.
Krinsky says he’s felt the shift, too. “I was like, damn—I want to be a louder, funner rock band again.”
GO: How Strange It Is album release show for There Is No Evil at Show Bar, 1300 SE Stark St., revolutionhall.com. 8 pm Thursday, Oct. 22. $16. 21+.
