Feel free to search far and wide for the latest version of something that hurts as good as “Songs of Leonard Cohen” and feels as chilly as Bon Iver’s “Blood Bank.” But what if I told you that you didn’t need to look further than Alder Street? Eugene based singer/songwriter Avery Haines, who goes by the alias of Amos Heart, released his first album with collaboration from Portland’s Ann Annie titled “The House on the Hill” this past December. If you haven’t heard it yet, I’m sorry my friend, but you’re late to the party.
With the debut, Heart takes a nostalgic peek into his past with a heavy dose of reflection onto the listener’s own past. Whispers of wintertime love and warm reminders of a life left behind make the new LP refreshingly personal. All tied up in the romantic gloom of the pseudo Siberian raw a Northwest winter holds, I’d call this indie-folk album the ideal backdrop for the rain that covers Eugene as your cold fingers grip this flimsy newspaper. While you could catch Heart and Ann Annie’s drift from an at-home listen, you’re bound to see a new side of the album when you hear the guys on their upcoming PNW tour. Joined by Portland singer/songwriter Searows, the crew will be playing shows from Eugene to Bellingham, Washington, Jan. 6 through 16 with their final show of the tour in Eugene on the 16th.
“We’re kind of creating a new sound with how we have to adapt to the live format to hit the road,” Heart said. “The sets are going to be more stripped than the album, but not as stripped as when I wrote them.” On record, “The House on the Hill” carries capacity in the jelly-thick layers of sound behind guitar and vocals. On tour, however, the band is presenting the album in its most raw form.
“We’re going back to the roots of a lot of these songs on the road and playing them as they were originally written,” Heart said.
The album’s cover hints at the nostalgia inside with a picture drawn by Heart’s father about 30 years ago. The first track then funnels you out of your own place and back to Heart’s childhood home in Portland. He takes on the role of a narrator and invites you inside. By walking you through Ann Annie’s atmosphere of ambient noise and stopping to show you old pictures on the walls, he puts you at ease and introduces you to the place you’ll sit for the rest of the songs.
From the first taste, “The House on the Hill” feels familiar. Song one moves seamlessly into the second with upbeat chatter behind warm chords. This is where it all starts to feel like an “A Christmas Carol” type dreamscape. The listener becomes an uninterrupting observer to the memories being shared.
“It’s a reflective time when I listen to these songs, and I really enjoy reflecting on the past,” Heart said as we move through the album.
While the album overall juxtaposes hopeful lyrics and melancholic look back, there are definitely moments on “The House on the Hill” that explode. Take the fifth track, “11 Janvier 80” — it goes from sitting in a whirly John Cale-esque pocket into a blow of drums and atmosphere in what seems like a second. This side of Heart’s sound floored me on my first listen — I’d never heard him do something like this before.
The only time I’ve seen Heart play, I was half a bottle of Mango-scato deep listening to gentle covers of “Chelsea Hotel.” The way Ann Annie toyed with some of these songs, adding modular synth and layers of sound, brought out Heart’s trackless side, breeding a balanced mix of letting loose and dialing back.
The whole thing was recorded at Echo Hill Studios up in Portland by Edwin Paroissien, who was the brain behind the latest from Laundry and the new stuff from Novacane, both local Eugene bands. It’s no surprise we were hearing so much space and life around the tracks on the production side of things as well.
“I wrote all of these songs over the years on my guitar and nothing else,” Heart said. “But when we got into the studio, a lot of them exploded into more vast sonic experiences. How I wrote ’em, and what they became by the end was a pretty big jump.”
Even so, that initial acoustic integrity isn’t lost with what the tracks picked up along the way. The lyrics capture the essence of homecoming, and the songs they sit inside are cozy all around. There’s a swirling sort of cold around the album that feels Northwest-made, but the tracks stay bright and full. If you told me this whole thing was thought up in a little log cabin with rain on the roof and gray in the sky, I’d be quick to buy it. Especially in tracks like “Maxwell” and “Troubadour,” the old cliché of “cold hands warm heart” comes to life.
There are little nuggets that I look for every time I go back to “The House on the Hill,” like the opening riff in “Case of Belonging” that feels as hazy as “Stranger Song” — but the place this album really peaks is the closing track, “I’m the Son of the Fall and the Rain.” It feels like what plays during the credits in one of those movies where everything turns out alright for everyone in the end. You can almost feel Heart cracking a smile as he sings it, and when the long fade out comes in, you find yourself sitting in its tenor.
I’d call “The House on the Hill ” one hell of an album to get you through the season and to the spring. Whether you check it out online or catch Heart and the band on tour, I hope you find the same cozy feeling in the album that I met on my first listen.
