Liam Betson jams a lot of words into the first album under his own name and one in particular stands out: "Depression." It's a big, sticky noun, clinical, embarrassing to say, let alone sing. But he works it into the penultimate song on The Cover of Hunter, "Made From Tin", naming the illness the "guts and gore" of an allegorical body that's also tethered by anxiety and whipped by insecurity. The song, one of the record's fastest, fills the space between its shaky guitar strokes with patient breaths of clarinet. At the chorus, Betson borrows the vocal lilt Conor Oberst used on the Bright Eyes deep cut "Amy in the White Coat". "For you, the world is poorly lit," he sings, "so by nightfall, you're used to it."
Not every lyricist is agile enough to be this blunt. Furious and mournful in turn, The Cover of Hunter navigates a hot, blurry headspace, the kind of slow-burning panic that corners you into the back of your own skull. Betson barely keeps the quiver in his voice under control as he wrings out his catalog of thick and heady lyrics. A former guitarist for Titus Andronicus (Patrick Stickles guests here on "X"), he's inherited that band's feel for dynamics. Songs glide, then crumple. The eight-minute opener "I Can't Tell If You're Looking At Me" kicks from a mellow strum into a bout of inflamed rock, all the while standing on just a handful of chords. Betson's careful with the notes he lets into his space. He'd rather see how far a simple progression can stretch than try to expand upon it. He begins Hunter with the same gall it took for Built to Spill to start off You In Reverse with "Goin' Against Your Mind", a nine-minute song made of just two chords.
"Cop Car" is another sprawler, one with so much space under its roof that it starts to breed its own ecosystem. Betson's unsure voice calculates its internal logic; he watches his feelings shift in color from lavender to blue, watches his love transform from beautiful to pure. I don't know why purity excludes beauty, but in his voice I can feel the tension between the two. I can feel how sad it is that the last hints of red have dripped from him.
At times, Betson's words bunch up on him. On the tight and fiery "Pocket Knife", he moves from imagining himself as an idol, a doll, and a decaying concrete slab to just imagining "what's possible"—then he repeats "what's possible" so many times its meaning starts to drain. Later, he saturates "The Primordial Will" with the phrase "sobbing in my bed" until the words become architectural, a haven, both comforting and claustrophobic. Betson drags the same pleasure out of language that you get from a riff looping around itself.
As rich in words as it is, The Cover of Hunter can grow dense to the point of alienation. Some clusters, like the one at the end of the third person flash fiction "X", don't quite make it out of the universe where they're conceived. Two film samples on the opener and closer also crack the album's fever. It doesn't help that the first sample is the same one that How to Dress Well used on Total Loss, a clip from the film Streetwise that forges an unnecessary portal between the two records. But that's a minor distraction. Betson strings his nerves taut here, straining for the better part of an hour not to fray. Words tumble out of him like he's trying to talk away the ennui, trying to get something, anything, to stick to someone besides himself. The Cover of Hunter keeps busy in order to smother its loneliness. It's the kind of desperation worth reveling in.
