Nobody else sounds quite like Hourloupe, the duo of Frank Menchaca and Anar Badalov who over the course of the past couple of years wrapped up a triptych around the theme of our ‘hidden night city’ which variously took in bronze age settlements and reanimated Egyptian mummies, New Orleans crypts and Moorish reflecting pools then a late-nineteenth-century trek in formal attire through the scrub of the Wawayanda, a staggered treatise on cohabitation and our leery relationship with the natural world, before Opera of the War scoured the charred remains of a ruined theatre and conceived a new work to be held ‘outside, in the plaza, studded by glass from shattered brasseries’, an ode to creativity through chance notes and romantic trysts which culminated in a clangorous iron din.
With Badalov’s brooding soundscapes undergirding Menchaca’s striking imagist poetry – whose cast of characters with their elisions and doublings are more redolent of plague masks, Francis Bacon paintings or Lynchian rabbits than anything from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or the Brothers Grimm – for their latest effort Levitating Fields the duo change tack slightly as they forego their usual spoken word poetry and the arching concepts of their previous albums for more conventional song structures, while the experimental textures and surreal imagery remain broadly intact.
Menchaca’s voice is a unique proposition within the spoken word genre, hushed sometimes to the point of a whisper, forceful like a forge or forceps without ever breaking into a yammer or growl, confiding yet still maintaining a certain distance, lilting without sounding ironic or coy. The originality of the duo carries over to their new album Levitating Fields, yet for all of that the references stack up, as Menchaca and Badalov who take their name from Jean Dubuffet’s enduring mixed-media Hourloupe cycle – the French artist coining the term with reference to the words ‘hurler’ (to roar), ‘huleler’ (to hoot) and ‘loup’ (wolf) – by assonance rather than any figurative or stylistic gesture speak to a wealth of popular music.
‘I travel deep, I travel light, on tender feet around your image, bright’ begins the opening song ‘Bone’ over a lurching sound palette of woozy synths and pitch-bent guitar, plus a few buried keys or smeared traces of pedal steel, before ‘Camphor Tree Blues’ in the words of the band ‘transposes the story of a boy who survived Hiroshima’s atomic blast onto a Carter Family-style ballad’. Hourloupe’s heady mix of ambient and post-rock or indie textures always harbours a spectre of the blues, as if the modern tenor of their sound and some of their contemporary frames of reference are ready to tip over and be washed away by some kind of instrumental primitivism or the rousing strains of a keening spiritual.
Their work carries the rural twang and bum philosophical bent of Modest Mouse, especially on some of the opening tracks like ‘Bones’ and ‘Magnolias’, which fortifies a burbling riff with some late-fifties imagery and figures of speech from the opening ‘Babe, refrigerated truck took my baby’ to the answered question ‘Have you ever seen a magnolia flower? Well, they’re pretty lewd’. There is also the trenchant lyricism and caustic or hollowed out atmosphere of solo Lou Reed and a synthesised form of Allen Lowe’s historicism, with the jazz veteran on America: The Rough Cut summoning a ragtag blend of honky-tonk and gospel music plus minstrelsy, medicine shows with their hayseed acts and miracle cures and one-chord ruminations which prefigured the blues.
There is a Lynchian aspect to Hourloupe also, timely but true and more lucid though less dreamy, sharing the keen thrust of his surreal imagery and the rockabilly swagger or countryfied air of his recent Chrystabell collaboration Cellophane Memories, which reminded me of those Elvis at Sun recordings given the moonlit reverb of Lynch’s guitar. The song forms of Levitating Fields also suggest Badalov’s work as one half of ARANANAR, his duo with the Czech bassist and vocalist Aran Epochal although Levitating Fields is more sober and wiry than the equally spellbinding Domov, co nebyl or Pod obÄma svÄty which are lustrous and sylvan, roving widely and glistening beneath the stars.
‘Camphor Tree Blues’ and ‘Seer in the House’ share a blend of pantheism and Pentecostalism, while ‘Winslow’ beyond its slinky dub minimalism develops the Southern Gothic character of Levitating Fields where ‘graffiti might look like the constitution’ upon the dilapidated walls of a mansion in the woods. ‘Old Country Tune’ nods to bluegrass and the standout image of a ‘purple bruise’ like a lonely evening segues into the fine harmonies of the country-flecked ‘Cathedral Bones’.
Menchaca and Badalov note that Levitating Fields contains references to literature, with the dark surrealism of ‘Cathedral Bones’ inspired by the Serbian American poet Charles Simic while ‘110 Olduvai’ mirrors the shifting narrative voices of Haruki Murakami’s works. ‘Cathedral Bones’ equally conjures something of the Nicole Dollanganger album Observatory Mansions with its tales of time scurrying like field mice, late night white trash TV stations and pills which burn like acid through enamel and bone, while the tenor and lilt of Menchaca’s voice recalls David Berman or Jake Xerxes Fussell with another standout line calling to mind the character of Calamity Jane as rendered in David Milch’s westward drama Deadwood who says ‘Every day takes figuring out all over again how to fuckin’ live’.
The sense of narrowness or vacancy on ‘Winslow’ and ‘Cathedral Bones’ makes ‘Gone a-Home’ even more staggering for its orchestral sweep, a bit of warmth out there in the cold even if it’s just by way of an upturned torch light and gas heater. Opening out through the sunset strums of a plaintive guitar, the piece develops by way of a fife and drums motif whose accordionesque wheeze hews closely to the harmonica melody from David Bowie’s instrumental change of pace ‘A New Career in a New Town’, with Low as good a comparison as any for the overall mood and variegated sound palette of Levitating Fields.
By contrast or as a means of winding down, ‘Signs and Wonders’ proves a slow-burning torch song, a goodbye to small towns and lost friends whose backdrop sounds like a subdued take on the thumping synths and kicks of Jennifer Rush’s eighties pop ballad ‘The Power of Love’. Without reference to the phrase, the title track truly does twinkle skyward bound, before Levitating Fields closes with ‘110 Olduvai’ and a reprise of the opening lyric, as Menchaca forlornly utters ‘I’m a bone outside all alone, no dog to take me home’.
