Hovvdy is the recording name of Charlie Martin and Will Taylor, a duo from Austin, Texas. Taster is their début full-length album, and seems to have been released riding the crest of a wave generated thanks to the gradual release of some killer singles. Fans of said singles will be pleased to know that the rest of the album follows suit, Hovvdy are the real deal.
Opener ‘Better’ is mumbled to the point of being incoherent, like the an under-the-breath rehearsal for a future encounter, before ‘Problem’ rises from the murk with a laid-back, almost surf-rock feel. However, once the vocals commence it becomes clear that this murk is never fully shaken off, a fine mist which clings to everything, blurring all edges, something we alluded to in our preview post as:
“A general melancholy, a soft insistent sadness which is neither keen nor desperate yet seeps into the very fabric of life, mellowing the highs and lows into something even and detached”
The fact that emotions are buried beneath this fog doesn’t mean they are not there. Indeed, there are moments of great beauty and sorrow across the eleven tracks on the album, small bright points of near-clarity, like the outlines of fish as viewed from above the water’s surface. ‘Favorite’ hints at a feeling both deep and long-lasting, a love or loneliness which fits snugly over real life and never leaves, while ‘Can’t Wait’ packs a certain conviction, as if the narrator has inched his neck above the clouds for the briefest second, viewing his life in third person. Even ‘Try Hard’, as indirect and lost a song you could ever hope to hear, circles around something important and tangible, even if it’s just a desire to be less unclear.
“leave you in the dark sometimes
i am unclear today
take enough to make it home in streetlight
you could not call your dad back then
forgot his name again
i never did try hard”
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Because the thing is, however omnipresent it may feel, the melancholy here is the product of the exact opposite. Hope. Taster does not describe a dull-eyed stupor or some mindless, robotic existence. It describes a person missing another, a person subject to feelings of irrational size and weight, so large in fact that they make reality seem flat and grey. This isn’t a Hollywood tale. The other will most likely never come back (hell, they might not even remember his name), and the confusion might never lift. But that is how us humans work. And what’s more human than being confused and sad and refusing still to let go of hope?
Taster is out now via Merdurhaus and Sports Day Records and you can buy it from the Hovvdy Bandcamp page.
Painting by Anja Salonen