HOUSTON

Bottom of the curve

CD, 54°40’ or Fight!

Always the same story – a great band forms somewhere in the backwaters of the world, like Minneapolis, MN – USA, records and releases a bunch of equally good and diverse records, and when finally one of them makes it to my little place here in the middle of nothingdom in Vienna, Austria, the band has already broken up. Doesn’t happen for the first time, let me tell you, but this time it is more than unimaginable that I will find some of their older records by chance in my favourite record-store. (For some reason I don’t want to order from overseas, maybe because the costs for postage would eat me up, or that I don’t trust people I don’t know with the details of my credit card. Maybe I am too paranoid or cautious. Well, if the hunger for cool music grabs me, all those inhibitions might soon be over anyway.)

At least not all is lost, because the various bandmembers will go on making music in new bands – as they have done before they founded Houston. One of the new bands is called Story of the Sea and they have some mp3s available that you can find via Houston’s website www.onesimpleband.com and who are great as well. And, they have no record out yet, which means this time I am up on the forefront. This is where you read it first! Apart from the aforementioned website, I have to admit. Aww, life is just a terrible line up of mishaps and bad luck. Naw, not really, but sometimes it feels that way.

It also feels that way when Houston do their full-force bass / guitar / drum-attack and the singer whines in that special way that is both melodious and emotional. The melancholic feel is there in the most joyous moments of rockers as in, quite unsurprisingly, during the love-drenched ballads. Houston call the first kind of songs “Dumb Rock” and that’s a name as good as any and just as misleading, because their way of rocking is quite clever. The same kind of clever that makes Josh Homme play straight rhythms in a way they sound strange or vice versa. The structuralism of math rock (now that is a terrible name) flown into the freely spreading puddle of drug-abuse, nightdrives and too many movies.

Houston don’t even shy away from lots of echo on the voice, e.g. during “The Day She Cracked” like mid-Eighties studio-rockers such as Toto or Yes used to have. And there are more million-selling bands that you have never heard of in Houston, like Rush and their multi-harmonic orchestral pop-songs. Or even slowly scratching at the harmonies and atmosphere of rock-ballads like “Dream On” (a current refound favourite of mine at the time of writing this) by Nazareth on “Heave” (except that they fall into a few chords of noise-rock at the end). And the most astonishing thing about all these things, which by themselves sound terrible enough, is that Houston put them all together and manage to pull it off with easy, grace and genius. And it is time that rock bands started being rock bands again, without the ironic nostalgia of guitarplaying dicks as The Darkness, but in the spirit that made a thousand young bands form after seeing Led Zeppelin live.

Houston take a lot of care at songwriting and structuring their music in a way that goes beyond regular rockbands. Their experience at rocking out night after night and still remain playing correctly has surely helped them, nevertheless the songs are as diverse as handful of pebbles and if you like to feel them in your hands you’ll also like their colours. So, the care they have taken in that was well worth it. If you have come across that mp3 with the two platinum-hits by Nickleback mixed together, one on the left channel and the other on the right, you’ll know what I mean. Talking about Nickleback, it is a damn shame that those douchebags fill stadiums and get rich and healthy with rockmusic and not bands that deserve it. Like this one here. Period.