Horse Feathers, House With No Home
Featured Album
Strums, whispers and whiskers: think Bon Iver
Scrappy, acoustic indie-folk has enjoyed a certain renaissance in the last half-decade, with strums-and-whispers replacing prickly, post-punk guitar as the underground's favorite new guise. Portland's Horse Feathers (fronted by the vocalist and songwriter Justin Ringle) has existed in various forms since 2004, but the band's low-lit, violin-addled folk songs (think Bon Iver, Bowerbirds) have been mostly overlooked — which is tragic, considering the extent to which Horse Feathers' rich, dulcet tracks deserve a spot in the beard-and-plaid-shirt scrum.
House with No Home is Horse Feathers' second full-length, and it's first on a major indie. Many will likely recognize the band's name as the title of the fourth Marx Brothers film (an oddly prescient football comedy that pits creationists vs. Darwinists), but Horse Feathers aren't a particularly goofy outfit: instead, Ringle and his bandmates play autumnal folk that's earnest and gentle (but, miraculously, never boring or contrived). "Working Poor" is the album's standout track, a shimmering, expertly harmonized ode to youthful fickleness. On nearly every song, Ringle's vocals run and ooze, eventually fading into a scratchy hum, which is augmented by his bandmates' banjo, guitar, cello, celeste, saw and light percussion; House with No Home has the soft, woozy feel of a northwestern sunset, an excessively calming, perspective-straightening exercise in perfect quietude.
