Highways crisscross Lomelda’s second album, and they are not the exciting, adventure-filled ones that star in movies like Little Miss Sunshine and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or in books like On the Road. These are lonely highways heavy with the distance between the driver and her destination—or the driver and the people she’s trying to reach both physically and emotionally. Distance saturates Thx, the Texas band’s Double Double Whammy debut, and it makes sense when you look at a map: Hannah Read, the creative force at the center of Lomelda, grew up in Silsbee, Tx., where she still lives with her family, two hours from Houston and four hours from Austin. She’s swaddled in distance, and in her music, she paints those miles of empty highway she has to drive all the time with a profound longing for closeness and wonder.
Take “Interstate Vision,” which opens the album. “Interstates are not what I want,” Read sings, her voice multi-tracked and harmonizing with itself, as though she’s not driving alone across Texas’ flat expanses at night but driving with herself every other time she’s cut through that same strip of road. Then she’s seeing angels burst out of someone else’s headlights; then she’s sitting with “you” in a parking lot, asking, “Can you feel me now?/Do you know me yet?” As in: I am here sitting next to you in the same motionless car, but are we together? Do you see me?
Co-produced with Read’s brother Tommy, who also wrote the song on which the second track “Bam Sha Klam” is based, Thx wanders to the very borders of those questions. Read’s vocal melodies sweep her range, and they’re often overdubbed with harmonies to lend depth and space to her singing. Read also plays guitar and bass throughout the album; other than drums and a handful of string instruments, she’s the only one you hear, meaning she’s Lomelda the way Conor Oberst used to be Bright Eyes—not really an individual behind a pseudonymous solo project, but not really a band, either. The individuation allowed by that arrangement bolsters Read’s songwriting. She knows when to keep quiet, as on the acoustic title track, and when to erupt, as on the closing track “Only World” and at the coda to “Bam Sha Klam.”
That coda is where the album peaks, which is not to say that it’s over by track two. It’s just that you’re in for a long (and lovely) comedown after “Bam Sha Klam”’s triumphant finish. Part of its endurance comes from its setup; Read catches you off guard, singing, “Why are ya laughing?/Listen here/This is serious,” and then, as if all the miles she’s ever driven came pouring out of her voicebox all at once, “It’s gonna be slow going/It’s gonna be slow going/It’s gonna be slow going from here on out.” It’s a coda to topple codas. File it next to Silver Jews’ “Federal Dust,” with which it shares its highway fetish and semantic simplicity, and Radiohead’s “Karma Police,” with which it shares its battering ram bassline and towering anxiety.
Read addresses one of her songwriting kin by name on the album: Elliott Smith, at the end of “Out There.” In an interview with NPR, she explained that her brother once told her he knew Smith personally, that the late songwriter had taught him how to smoke cigarettes after a show. She always knew Tommy had been lying to her, but she spent years trying to get her head around the fib, to make sense of the idea that someone could insinuate himself into your personal life through his music. “Elliott, what have you done to us?” she asks in one of her endless searching melodies. He’s a ghost at this point and yet no further away from Read and her brother than the time when Tommy told her that story. Smith’s still out there in the dark slipping past the car windows as Read drives; he’s still messing with their heads, crawling around in their sadnesses, putting words to moments that otherwise would have passed like shadows on asphalt.
Thx comes with its share of sadnesses, but they’re not the kind you necessarily notice on first listen. Unlike peers like Julien Baker or Told Slant, Read prioritizes immediately arresting melodies over immediately arresting lyrics. Her words tend toward the casual while her singing gravitates toward the adventurous, and so you might be too caught up with where her notes are going to pay attention to what she’s saying. But by the time her sentences ring clear on the third or fourth listen, Thx already has you in its hooks.
