The members of Spokane hand-built a house while recording Little Hours, which isn't to say that the album is about the house they built. If it were, the place would be virtually uninhabitable: sprawling, drafty, and sparsely furnished, with hallways leading nowhere, gaps in the flooring, staircases petering out in mid-flight. It's more accurate to say that the house and the album are about each other, parallel expressions of the spiritual temperament that attends the constructive urge: If the house is just a house, Little Hours is its reflection on the surface of a pond.
To build with one's hands has always been a spiritual act, and now, when so many of us no longer need to do so to survive, it's perhaps more so than ever. Maybe the title of Spokane's album intentionally refers to the Roman Catholic Church's daytime prayer hours, or maybe they just thought it sounded neat. Accidental or no, it's an apt title-- there's a sense of consecration in Spokane's humble altars of piano, strings, and guitar, a quiet air of unrushed ritual in their contemplative movement. Album opener "Singing", which features the sampled birdsong ubiquitous to this sort of atmospheric slowcore amid a wispy piano ballad sung by Rick Alverson, sounds more like an idea for a song, recorded with a jaw full of anesthetics, than a finished song. This music doesn't assert itself, it kneels, reverent as a worshiper, inside its own austere architecture.
Like a house, Spokane's songs are assembled in plain view, over time, piece by modest piece. On "Minor Careers", sunken vocal harmonies and weary percussion lay like mortar between sequentially mounted bricks of arpeggiated acoustic guitar, hovering strings, and flecks of piano. Like a house built by hand, practical exigencies take precedence over flights of fancy-- the materials are functional and unembellished, fitted together with an eye toward structural integrity more than style, combined not wantonly but with deliberate care. "Building" holds real piano and toy piano in delicate counterbalance, the former tracing out a submerged melody, the latter bubbling up through it.
Little Hours' strength lies in its stubborn consistency: This is a band that makes notes seem like widely-spaced campfires on a dark plain, tracing an intermittent path of life through the barren night, and they don't ever pull back from this imposing blankness. Nothing on the album breaks its somber, lonesome mood. But its weakness lies in the equivocal aura of the band's chosen style-- neither minimal enough to achieve the hypnotic quality of fellow piano-droners Library Tapes nor fleshed out enough to engage the listener more viscerally, Spokane's music can settle frustratingly into the ambiguous mid-range of our attention. Rare sonic embellishments, like the echo effect on the creeping piano of "Thankless Marriage", are welcome, but simply protract the structures through time in a way that doesn't meaningfully diversify them. The result is an album that's thoroughly pleasant without having any truly memorable moments, like Galaxie 500 without the buried pop chops. It's a fine house that Spokane has built, functional and rich with decorative potential. Maybe next time, they'll throw some pictures on the walls.
