Kevin Krauter makes soft, well-worn shoegaze music, kind of like that old sweater from high school you still keep around. The Indiana musician and Hoops bassist’s second album, Full Hand, is first and foremost a spring record; it makes for nice background noise as the sun stays out longer and the grass gets greener. The 12 songs are breezy and genteel, with very little brewing below the surface. Krauter doesn’t make sweeping statements in the lyrics or arrangements. Instead, what we hear is weightless and bucolic, even blissful.
Full Hand cherry-picks and subverts elements of ’70s soft-rock and R&B. Where it would feel obvious to have live drums, Krauter will play with drum machines. When it would make more sense for a song to fade out quietly, Krauter will write an off-kilter synthesizer arrangement. Take “Opportunity,” a honey-coated song about the light coming in from his bedroom window. Resonant keys linger gently, and a drum machine shuffles like a bike on an unpaved road. The song unfolds methodically until the end, where Krauter shakes things up with a left-of-center, vaguely baroque keyboard part. If not for that quiet bait-and-switch at the end, this song would be innocuous: lovely, but not particularly memorable.
It’s easy to miss Krauter’s compelling and complicated arrangements; the record is subdued almost to a fault. You have to put in work to feel drawn into Krauter’s world. A song like “Kept” feels more aligned with Swedish dream-pop bands like the Radio Dept than it does with polished indie rock from the early 2010s that feels like its more obvious analog. What at first seems like chilled-out disaffection is actually closer to pure melancholy. When he writes about his experiences, he almost always does so cryptically, taking great care to keep things out of view as he sees fit.
The title track is the album’s most fully realized. It sounds like an AM-radio gold supercut, guitars building to a pool of noise you want to float atop forever over a tight drum groove. Krauter is at his best when he writes these sunny, nostalgic arrangements. A stellar groove doesn’t make an album, though. Krauter writes pretty, deceptively complex melodies, but offers very little substance. Full Hand is a house with no insulation: nice on the outside, but not really a place to call home.
Buy: Rough Trade
