"You can’t take it with you when you go" doesn’t sound very much like a #YOLO cliché when Katie Bernstein sings it on "Green Light", a folksily pensive break-up song on Houndstooth’s second album, No News from Home. She delivers the phrase in an eloquently flat voice that suggests an Americanized Nico, perhaps not as intimate but more agile in her phrasing, and she bends that last long "O" upwards toward a heaven that may or may not actually be there. She might be talking about death, but in the context of both the album and the song, it’s more likely she’s talking about something potentially worse: touring. You can’t load up the security and comfort of home with the guitars, amps, and drum cases, but there’s always room in the van for anxiety and disappointment. You might leave a friend or lover behind, and only occasionally will you find a bit of peace alongside the side of some highway. "I found a new love," Bernstein tells her old love, "a love of the new world and what it would be without you."
Touring is not the subject of No News from Home. It’s more like the backdrop against which the band’s songs as well as its own story all play out: a necessary rite of passage for any indie act, an inevitable fact of life like taxes and that other thing. The four musicians in Houndstooth all know that life intimately: Before they played their first show together in May 2011, they cut their teeth in such Portland bands as the Parson Red Heads, Inside Voices, and the Threads of Grass. They had developed a local reputation as a dynamic live act skirting the difference between breezy country rock and tightly-coiled krautrock, but when they recorded their first album, 2013’s Ride Out the Dark, they abridged their epic jams into tidy pop songs. It may not have been exactly representative of their onstage attack, but it showcased Bernstein’s distinctive vocals and John Gnorski’s spidery guitar licks and it allowed them to tour well beyond the Pacific Northwest.
That experience obviously informs both the sound and the subject matter of No News from Home. Especially on the slow-burn "Amelia" and "Witching Hour" (with its sly shout-out to Donnie & Joe Emerson), the songwriting is sharper and more open-ended, as though the stories they’re telling are still unfolding before them. Furthermore, the band have developed a more confident dynamic, evoking a sense of motion and travel in the clash of guitars and the persistent click of Graeme Gibson’s snare. Album opener "Bliss Boat" sounds like a natural show closer, highlighting seemingly everybody in the band. There’s a subdued swing in the rhythm section and scrappy drama in the guitars, as the song builds fluidly into an epic jam that’s part Can, part Byrds.
All that touring and woodshedding has apparently taught them not to waste a note, because the first side of No News from Home has a determined cohesion, sequenced to evoke the choppy rhythms of the road. Almost inevitably they lose some of that focus on side two, whose songs don’t have quite the same sense of purpose or that same sense of movement. Closer "They’re Racing Tonight", with its hints of Springsteen mythology, saunters instead of speeds off into the sunset, with so little sense of closure that you can almost hear the words "To be continued…" as that last organ chord fades. Hopefully, their next album will take Houndstooth even further from home.
