Through the Trees
Sentimental Monsters
2013
By Justin Stone
Sentimental
Monsters, the new record by Austin-based band Through the Trees, is a
hook-heavy rock-pop epic. “Lost” opens the album on a catchy, surf-like instrumental
passage, guitar, bass and drums rolling together, clean at first, but then the
first break hits, distortion lifts the wave, and the riffage continues. Rock
‘n’ roll. Then another break and a quieter melodic passage gives way to a
haunted, repeating lyric: “Hey, I lost my way.” Then the voice gives way and
the surf passage is urgently revisited, before another big break in which the
song slows again, epic power chords and keys dropping a rain on the sea. Voice
quietly returns: “You tried your best / They’re not impressed / Optimism has
always been / Your Achilles heel / It’s hard to feel what others talk about.”
Then, a devastating truth: “We are all sentimental monsters.” The song carries
out quietly, in lament: “I overheard you / What you said was not true.” It is a
familiar hurt, and the narrator too is complicit. He ends the song quietly
singing, “I forgive you.” Heavy. Pretty. The whole of the album plays like this.
Exploring its twists and turns, absorbing its shifting tones, contours, shape
and definition, feels to me like wandering a large, many-roomed house in dream,
a place familiar but continually new. A haunted house. And there are others
here: foggy shapes, faces from the past and future. Many others. But maybe only
two. Maybe only one. Friends and lovers, ghosts, me. People I can recognize but
whom I can never know, always lost but always returning again and again. Seeking
connection but more often bumping into and past one another. Reaching out,
pulling away. Both calling to one another and calling one another out. Accusation,
disbelief. Hope. Ego run amok. Sentimental Monsters.
Ben McCormack writes songs I love. Heady,
hearted, dynamic rock ‘n’ roll songs. They get into me, into my ears and my
guts. Song after song, he creates spaces I am compelled into. I like to “be”
with Ben’s records. They are records I attend to, that I play in entirety. Each record a many-parted whole unique
and deep in song. They are always dexterous medicine. I was first introduced to Ben’s songcraft via The Stags some
10 years ago in El Paso, Texas. That band, both live and on record, remains for
me a personal highlight of the form. Art rock. Story rock. Weird and classic. Angular
and disarming. There have been other bands, Sweetdust and Mockery Birds to name
a couple. I tell you I have liked all of it, every single song. I think
McCormack’s output a standalone body of work. He is a student of songcraft. It
is not surprising to me that he is also a longtime, grateful servant to public
education, a caring teacher and heady administrator, humble and committed. I
have always felt Ben’s professional craft speaks to his musical/story craft and
vice versa. He believes in the journey that is being alive, being a learner
always. Empathy and hearing highlight his songcraft, as do keen, discerning
observations. He sees forest and
trees. I think he speaks to aspects of the modern American condition. A haunted
house where little is at it seems. Image-driven bullshit. Liars and fakers. Thieves
and opportunists. Starry-eyed boys and girls. Loss of meaning. What to believe
in? How and why to have a human voice in a cacophony of manufactured messages
that seek to render the all of us one monstrous, consuming ego? In “Forgiveness”
the narrator intones, “At night I dream in curses shaped like you / And I
always disappear in your foggy truths.” In “Statue” the narrator admits, “I
don’t say no / I just say never / I find it much safer to be grandiose.” We are
all sentimental monsters.
These songs are gut gifts. Butt
kicks. Soothe sayings. A densely-packed masterpiece, the song “Everyone” is another
multi-part sonic journey, weaving vivid imagery into a lyrical, haunted
narrative: “Well it’s been a long since / Since I found out / What you were
talking and talking about / You were talking too loud / Right over my shoulder
/ During our embrace / In a truthful mirror / From a dark place / I met your
two face / I met your true face.” He repeats, “You were talking too loud.” And
you were. You know it. You were talking too loud. The marriage of music and
story here is captivating. The sound is rock ‘n’ roll, a mix of punk and pop
and old school, classic, r & b, but it is not a derivative exercise. It is
fresh and personal. There are so many great payoff lines and musical moments.
Tension built to be relieved.
“Everyone” continues, “You’re talking too loud on the lips of another /
You’re stealing my words / And singing to my lover / And now you can take /
Your true place behind my back / Just like everyone else.” And then the song
breaks into pretty finale, an epic outro, keys brightening the rock melody as
we hear a powerful, repeating cry: “And you / You’re like everyone else /
You’re just like everyone.” Gawd. It feels true. Mysterious. Maybe inscrutable.
I find myself wanting to listen to it over and over again. But then the next song
starts, just as good, just as catchy, just as layered, and I’m propelled
forward to a new chapter. For me, the whole of Sentimental Monsters moves like this.
McCormack’s is an intelligent,
complex rock songcraft. I am going to throw a few names out for
reference: Greg Cartwright, Elvis Costello, Frank Black, The Kinks, Iggy Pop,
Lou Reed, Mark Knopfler. Literate, insistent story rock. In the dramatic song structures and
complex compositions, often dark explorations that journey toward and in the hope
of release and light, I hear echoes of the songcraft of Roy Orbison. This is
theatrical rock writing but not showy or flashy. It is ambitious but workmanlike. Reaching. Also, Sentimental Monsters has an epic pop
feel to it. It is decidedly catchy. I hear The Cars in this album, Ric Ocasek’s
timeless ear for hooks and craft. “Hopeless” opens on propulsive hard rock
waves and then breaks into precise lyrical declaration, “See the couple in
their modern home / They don’t look happy / They don’t look sad / So glad not
to be alone / But they are lonely / In their modern home.” A pretty break
follows, keys brighten the urgent riffs, and then the lyrics return: “Right off
the balcony of hope / Leap the hopeless / Into each other’s arms / Now they
make craters everywhere that they go / They treat their friends like tourists /
In their modern home.” I think it powerful stuff. Moody closer “Wolves” is
simultaneously beautiful and perilous: “Trapped / Under a tree / With my sworn
enemy / Waiting for the wolves / To come down the mountain.” I am obsessively
precious about songcraft, which to my thinking is something like an impossible
to define coming together of so many elements, among them voice, story, melody,
mood, mystery, dynamism, uplift, shift, intrigue, seeking, questioning, loss,
discovery, heartache and humor. It can arrive in many different modes or genres.
It is something I only know when I hear it, and I hear it in the music of
Through the Trees, the album that is Sentimental
Monsters.
Through the Trees is the best
vehicle yet for Ben’s songs. This band is a power trio, sharp, heavy and
precise but also expansive in reach and breadth. It is rock textured and
nuanced. The rhythm section of Benjamin Howard on bass and Joe Meier on drums
is a primal, intuitive, and dynamically flexible force. The sound of Sentimental Monsters strikes me as
expertly crafted and studied. It feels like the work of people committed to their
individual crafts and how each serves the whole. Recorded, engineered, mixed,
and mastered by Lars Göransson at Sounds Outrageous, produced by Göransson and
McCormack, the record is always just enough. Never slight but also never
overdone with tricks and bells and whistles typical in so much indie and
mainstream rock today. The songs here are first and foremost. The structure is
built that the listener can go there and wander. Move and be moved. See
yourself, others. Run, hide, take cover. And when you can escape the haunted
hallways dark with apparitions and enemies and past selves and you and dreams,
you lay in the sun. You feel new, a part of everything else. It is a literary
thing, giving back, revealing, shading like good literature does. In it one
feels less alone, more aware. Sentimental
Monsters is a complex, compelling summer album. It burns through the fog and
lives.
