Looked at cynically, the Proper Ornaments is a great name for a band infatuated with their record collections—a group that decorates their spare little songs with only the most finely curated influences, like so many baubles on a tree. The Beatles’ White Album here, Pink Floyd’s Meddle there. The Beta Band here, Yo La Tengo there. The Velvet Underground everywhere.
But there’s no reason to be cynical about this London quartet. The Proper Ornaments are based primarily around the songwriting partnership of James Hoare (of Ultimate Painting and Veronica Falls) and Max Oscarnold. Unlike some of their ’60s-loving, vinyl-obsessed peers (Crystal Stilts, say, or looking back a little farther, Brian Jonestown Massacre), it’s possible to separate your appreciation of the Ornaments’ nifty influences from your appreciation of their songs. The pair craft beguilingly simple, guitar-driven psych-pop stitched together by gorgeous, laidback harmonies. Compared to their excellent 2014 album, Wooden Head, Foxhole turns down the six-string jangle and turns up the sad-sack vibes for a more intimate, lovelorn affair. This is a Sunday morning, lay-in-bed-’til-2 p.m. album—a big warm blanket of analog guitar and woolly harmony.
True, this kind of thing has been done many times before. But what’s remarkable about Foxhole is just how effortlessly the Proper Ornaments pull it off. (Of course, the band is well aware that making the effortful sound effortless was a major part of the Velvets’ mojo, too.) The Ornaments’ new focus on the piano smooths out the band’s rougher edges, giving songs like “Memories” and “Just a Dream” a seductively sad pallor. Hoare and Oscarnold’s sly guitar work remains the band’s centerpiece, however. On “The Frozen Stare” and “Cremated (Blown Away),” their supple electric guitars trade riffs like old friends at a bar.
The Ornaments take their time on Foxhole. Tunes built on layers of acoustic guitar, piano, and soft percussion unwind lazily, never drawing too much attention to themselves (see, in particular, “I Know You Know,” a dead ringer for a B-side from the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Stoned & Dethroned sessions). No one plays very hard, yet the melodies stick. As with Wooden Head, the Ornaments’ power lies in their restraint.
Despite all the comfy sounds, the band’s lyrical vision is chilly, dead-eyed, sinister. A near-suffocating sense of regret over lost love and good times past hangs over the entire record. On “Cremated,” Oscarnold longs to be turned to ash with his former lover, their remains dumped together in the same jar. The album title itself is a reference to the claustrophobic horrors of war: “Private, don’t speak/Don’t move at all/Keep your head down/In the foxhole,” Hoare sings on “Jeremy’s Song.”
All that gloom goes down easy, however. The Ornaments are rarely heavy-handed or solipsistic about their troubles. And anyway, it’s nostalgia—regret’s more hopeful, more sentimental cousin—that remains the record’s core concern. “See me in the back page of last year’s modern age,” Hoare sings on album standout “Back Pages,” positioning his band as both defiantly out of step with the status quo and dedicated to the ideals of an earlier, better time. The Ornaments are yet another in a long line of floppy-haired guitar bands flying the flag of a purer pop past, but they’re also, unmistakably, one of the better, least pretentious ones. Sometimes it pays to be grateful rather than cynical.
