A couple of particulars to get out of the best way up entrance. House Constellation Examine is Asher White’s fifteenth album, although the precise variety of releases on her Bandcamp, which incorporates numerous facet tasks and non-album collections, is 26. The earliest of those, a ghostly collage of suggestions and discipline recordings of Icelandic landscapes, got here out when the Windfall musician was 14 years outdated. She is now 24.
White’s prodigious early years could assist to elucidate the accomplishment and creativeness of House Constellation Examine, an album whose abundance of concepts might sound extreme if it weren’t so rigorously organized. One tune appears like Radiohead with periodic interruptions from Lightning Bolt, one other like Burt Bacharach by means of Jim O’Rourke, a 3rd like a Gamble & Huff symphonic soul epic downsized to the size of a basement rehearsal room. A partial record of devices that White performed consists of guitar, bass, drums, banjo, glockenspiel, granular synthesis, piano, and “pretend mellotron”—practically the whole lot on the album, save for some horns and extra electronics.
White clearly loves pop and outré music from many eras. The interval that House Constellation Examine most instantly recollects is the one simply earlier than she began importing her work: the mid-to-late 2000s, a time when indie rock held accessibility and experimentation in delicate steadiness, when a bruising noise-rock band may share a invoice with a psych-folk collective that appeared type of like a cult, when DIY scenes had simply sufficient consideration to feed bands’ ambition—however not but a lot that they crumbled underneath the stress or cleaned up their acts and signed to majors. And although White wrote and recorded House Constellation Examine primarily by herself, it feels distinctly social, in an embodied, in-person, maybe old school type of method. A lot music from younger songwriters and producers now evokes the solitary overstimulation and context collapse of hours spent on-line. White’s feels extra like hitting the highway with a pal, making impromptu stops, laughing collectively, stepping into arguments whose stakes should not hidden behind screens, then speaking it out and hitting the highway once more.
House Constellation Examine begins in transit, with “Theme From Leaving Philadelphia,” a travelogue {that a} much less adventurous arranger might need set to easy acoustic guitar or piano, for max directness and authenticity. As an alternative, White opts for sounds that mirror the surprise and frenzy of her departure. First, there’s a fanfare of horns, voices, and perhaps pretend mellotron that recollects Aaron Copland’s hymns to the American spirit greater than it does indie rock. Then the drums are available with a groove like a runaway prepare. There’s an acoustic guitar someplace deep within the combine, strumming so exhausting and quick I can’t assist however fear about carpal tunnel. Asa Turok’s trombone and Addy Schuetz’s sax bob and weave, typically providing lyrical countermelodies and typically terse punctuation. Cowbells clang like solely cowbells can. White sings as if at a snug take away from the frenzy, tracing exuberant spirals of melody, unbothered by the speeding noise on the opposite facet of the prepare window. The rhythms of the phrases neatly match the hairpin turns of the tune; impressions of interior feeling and outer panorama start to blur in her imagistic lyrics. One line returns persistently, nagging because it might need nagged the hungover passenger as she wrote: “I’m nonetheless drunk!”
