After 17 tracks, Hovvdy he's about to reveal his thesis: “We're gonna talk a lot/Not much needs to happen,” Martin sings on the aching “Angel.” At times like these, Hovvdy's main artistic analogue may not be other musicians so much as Richard Linklater – another Lone Star sentimentalist who lets his work unfold with the rhythms of life, weaving together a series of scenes and characters that look like vaguely with a plot. Linklater's films are often thought of as comedies, though from an older, more cynical perspective, they may actually be psychological horror films with the coming-of-age perspective looming off-screen like an invisible, airborne monster. The video for Hovvdy's best song of 2019 “Ruin (my ride)” was their “moon tower party” minus the brawl, with Martin, Taylor and their friends doing an increasingly drunken Texas two steps late summer. night, living the happy future where no one exists Dazed and confused the Everyone wants some!! they have to see for themselves.
However, the five years since have also made “Ruin (my ride)” a bittersweet memory. The Hovvdys are no longer the inseparable buds implied by the album cover — Martin lives in Nashville and Taylor lives in St. Louis. Although Hovvdy he alternates between lead vocals, the perspective is consistent enough, the earnest optimism bolstered by just enough conflict to make it all feel earned. Taylor and Martin's vocals peak with a frustrated exhale, but they know how to bite the expressions of absence – “I swore you left town, maaaan” or “My bad, I'm imagining it again”. Martin decries the limitations of his brotherly love on “Bubba” and when he repeats “God I hate it,“ it has the terrifying impact of a black metal scream.
Talking about Hovvdy to another longtime fan, I assumed you could make a drinking game out of every time they say “love” or “light,” or a family member's name, or a local landmark, or a southern interstate. It was a joke, but that's kind of the point Hovvdy? You take the time to truly bask in the warm glow of a friendship that endures across time and space, the service to hardships endured with joy, or just a day when you took the long way home just because that's what your teenage self admired. It's almost too easy to quote the top line from Linklater's coming-of-age play Childhood: “The moment is fixed, the moment seizes us.” But Martin and Taylor do not think in works, in grand gestures and proclamations, in magic or illusion. Hovvdy it simply slows down time long enough to capture the beauty in the moments that always threaten to slip away if not immediately captured and loved.
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