Still House plants play with an egalitarian ethos. no instrument dictates how a song moves. “It's natural to think that the voice sits in front, the drums lead and the guitar is like the bricks, but we move all of that around quite a bit,” Hickie-Kallenbach said recently. The Quietus. Clark said that “it's important to remember [the guitar] it's just metal and wood' and 'not to get too caught up in what a guitar is 'supposed' to do'. Perhaps this extends to the way Hickie-Kallenbach's lyrics, which are often inscrutable, don't seem to define what a song is – as she said The wireshe moves away from the mandate to “narrate” as a singer.
But when her words ring clear, If I don't make it, I love you offers a unique blend of mystery and revelation. “Deeply sensitive, deeply awake, mostly head down,” Hickie-Kallenbach coyly sings on “no sleep deep risk,” putting a character within the abstractions of the music. “I quite like it my way.” On “MMM,” I'm sure she croons, “I just want my friends to catch me/I wanna support them more,” between admissions that “I just want to be seen right” and “I wish I was cool,” her melisma last word lasts a full five seconds. This heartfelt sentiment is as dangerous as the improvisational bones. It emphasizes the intimacy and vulnerability inherent in their fractured-open musical dialogue. The album's title itself is an emotional prism: If I don't make it, I love you it could be what you'd say to a friend when you're not sure whether to throw their birthday party, or it could be the most tragic text message ever written.
There are precedents for the postmodern collage and fragmentation of Still House Plants. This is the process-oriented essence of 70s post-punk, prioritizing deconstructed sounds over impossible wholeness—a fractured aesthetic for our fragmented, plural selves. Still House Plants referenced other 90s and early 00s math influences (such as Bedhead, Life Without Buildings and Red House Painters, who inspired their band name). However, the fixation on the past feels at odds with the unrefined music. If Still House Plants really resembles anything about those predecessors, it's how solid their vision feels for its time – not just in its feverish assembly and revelation of stylistic composition, but in its fusion of emotional honesty, electronic technique and conceptual strategies art.
It further speaks to the rare power of Still House Plants that this record is out via a tiny British label called Bison, which was formed after its founder, an employee of London's avant-garde music hub Cafe Oto, saw a 2016 set by the band and established the imprint to release their debut. Maybe the space within the tracks allows us to bring what we want to the music, but I associate Still House Plants with the circumstances of how I first heard them, a time when my mind and heart were rearranged with the intense, uncomfortable clarity of a new beginning. note to note, If I don't make it, I love you it seems to adapt itself to this productive, undefined energy. “It's hard to know anything,” Hickie-Kallenbach sings on “Pant.” “But the feeling is good for me.”
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