Imagine you have gone weeks eating TV dinners and suddenly you find yourself in the grocery store’s produce section. You handle the apples and peaches simply because you have forgotten what fruit feels like. The aisles are well lit and bursting with life, but still your mind turns to the loved one you’ve recently lost, then to all the emotional baggage attached.
Scenes like these, with a tactile rush of vulnerability, are what Palehound’s leader and songwriter Ellen Kempner does best. You can feel the moment she describes because her songwriting is all about feel. And this grocery-aisle epiphany—as heard on her new record‘s best song, “Feeling Fruit”—is marked by Kempner’s sweetly picked guitar, which seems to rot from the inside. As she hums and whispers to herself, the mounting musical tension slowly boils off. It’s a tiny crushing sadness rendered in technicolor, suspended for what seems like forever in a song that’s only two and half minutes long.
The 23-year-old Boston rocker’s sophomore LP is ripe with loss. In one of the record’s other memorable scenes, found on “If You Met Her,” Kempner recalls a moment she shared with a young friend who died suddenly, arguing at a Dunkin Donuts while eating blueberry glazed pastries. Delivered over an infectious jangle and cheerily unflinching beat, the song has a bittersweet ache. Kempner tries to make sense of it all and comes to few conclusions, other than knowing her friend would love her new girlfriend.
For all the grief here, there’s also light. While Kempner was mourning her loved ones, she also happened to fall in love for the first time and fully embraced her queerness. This struggle between moving forward and being tugged back, by actual memories and by the muscle-memory of anxiety, is central to A Place I’ll Always Go, giving it more of a thematic center than her 2015 debut, Dry Food.
Kempner’s project has matured in more ways than one as she’s bubbled up through Boston’s DIY scene. Dry Food was lo-fi and grungy, like it had a little dirt under its fingernails (in a great way); A Place I’ll Always Go is cleaner, the guitar crunch glinting and the production having room to twirl. There are echoes of earlier bands, with songs that brings to mind Smith Westerns (“Turning 21”), Beach House (“At Night I’m Alright With You”), the Strokes (“Flowing Over”), or Wilco (“Room”). But Palehound have always sounded like variations on classic indie rock, arranged around Kempner’s unique whisper of a voice and way of seeing the world that draws out the moodiness. This undercurrent distinguishes the project, and makes Kempner worth following.
There is a lot of music about anxiety in the air these days, but Ellen Kempner’s voice is specific and visceral. It's the work of someone who can't hold it in, an emotion she captures quite well on “Flowing Over.” Lucky for us, her nervous, oversized heart knows not to tell, but instead show.
