At first blush, It Hugs Back seems like an awful name for a band, but upon hearing their debut album, it makes some sense. The group specialize in warm, gentle songs that return a listener's affection, but do not go much further-- their music is like a reassuring embrace, but it never feels like an equivalent to kissing, or anything remotely sexual. Cuddling is out of the question too, as the record's overwhelmingly melancholy tone suggests consolation rather than romantic bliss.
Inside Your Guitar runs a gamut of shoegazer and dream pop styles. The group add nothing new to pre-existing genres, but are successful in customizing familiar sounds to suit their taste for clean tones and an abundance of negative space. For example, the relatively upbeat "Work Day" comes across like a My Bloody Valentine song remodeled as a crisp, immaculate Phoenix track, and the lovely "Forgotten Song" sounds like an exaggeratedly ethereal version of Iron & Wine. In other cases, the quartet hew closer to their most obvious influences. The organ-centric songs borrow the muted buzz of Electrelane and early Stereolab, and about half of the album in some way recalls the particular balance of drone, delicate melody, and catharsis found on Yo La Tengo's mid-90s albums Painful and Electr-o-pura.
It Hugs Back may be lacking in terms of originality, but their craft and skill is hard to deny. Even when it seems as though they are just writing Designer Imposters versions of Yo La Tengo and Electrelane songs, the results tend to measure up favorably in comparison to many actual Yo La Tengo and Electrelane recordings. Guitarist Matthew Simms is particularly gifted, most especially when he steps away from standard indie rock strumming and focuses on simple, elegantly constructed lead melodies that ring out in the near-silence of slow, ambient tracks such as "Q" and "Soon". The up-tempo numbers keep the album from feeling flat and monochromatic, but Simms' murmured vocals keep them from lifting off, dragging assertive rhythms down into a self-conscious passivity.
That sort of tension has the potential to be very evocative and moving, but Simms' persona is too nondescript to make it work. Whereas Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley both possess distinct voices that lend character, subtext, and concrete detail to their low key vocal performances, Simms just sounds blank and faceless, and this makes it much more difficult to connect with his music on a personal level. When Hubley quietly sings a song like "Nowhere Near", it feels as though we are being drawn into the mysterious inner world of a specific human being. There is nothing so powerful on Inside Your Guitar. Even when It Hugs Back seem to hold us close, the intimacy in their music seems hollow, impersonal, and anonymous.
