(3/6/5) 015: Hovvdy - 'Meant'
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I just took a proper pause from the day to read this beautiful essay from Niko Stratis, one of my very favourite music writers. I almost put 'music' in parentheses there because Niko so often uses life in all its messiness and beauty as a vessel for covering music, rather than it being the key focus. A process that most appeals to my own preference for both writing and reading about songs.
Niko's latest piece, loosely based on Gillian Welch's 2003 Soul Journey LP, begins with the following paragraph:
I am returned from a journey home, and if you have ever moved away from home and then gone back to visit you know exactly what I’m saying when I tell you my chest is still recovering from the journey.
If you've ever moved away from home and then gone back to visit and then read a paragraph like this you know exactly what I'm saying when I tell you my chest was recovering for a long time after reading it.
Home – in all its form and ideals – is such an ever-present and forthright character in how I consume and share music. Most of the songs I love, truly love, either remind me of places I've hoped might be a home, or able to conjure up a whole world of their own which somehow, miraculously, feels like it might offer such a thing – even for just a handful of minutes or so.
Hovvdy, a duo who've grown to be one of my favourite bands of all time, have a special knack of drifting in and out of both of those spaces. They sing, often and beautifully, of seemingly real places and people, name-checking friends and family, singing of the wholesomeness of both in a way that makes their work sincere, earnest and wholly sweet. They also, for me at least, have a way with sound, with voice and melody, that requires a little time for my chest to recover from.
Their latest album finds Charlie Martin and Will Taylor covering similar territory but in ways that once again feel fresh and compelling. Where their first album introduced with frayed gritty edges, they've mostly mellowed since, and this, a sprawling, nineteen-song, 53-minute long self-titled effort, leans most purposefully into something approaching pop music, many of the tracks underlined with a playfulness, especially in its tender instrumentation.
Wandering most pertinently in this direction is 'Meant', the album's fizzy, frazzled centre-piece. Their boldest production to date, with dense drums and a bubbling synth line that feels ready to shatter at any moment, the song matches that energy with a dejected vocal that barely tries to hide the dull ache of a summer getting away from you, the swirling dusty ground slipping through your fingers. "Dark hair but lighter, when the hot days are longer," they sing, before lamenting: "I needed you to stay right here and you did. I wanted you to know how much it meant."
Already, only a week or so into its release, the track feels like a gut-punch, a gentle pull at the seams of my own life, for reasons it's often best not to try and dig into. Musically, it feels particularly singular. It's just a three-and-a-half minute pop song but, especially when played loud, I'm not sure I've heard much like it before. It feels sad and stuck but also loving and full of empathy and...well, weird?
But then it's also homely, familial and familiar, and just as it's drawn you in the whole thing spins away again, voice-less, pirouetting into the sky like a faulty firework, just a tale of dull light and the threat of a great big colourful explosion that never quite arrives; a split-second that lasts a lifetime.
Hovvdy LP is out now, via Arts & Crafts
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