More than a decade after their debut, Ratboys’ 2023 album, The Window, fulfilled the potential of the band’s country and emo-inflected indie rock, developing their sound like a photo going from faded to sharp. One song, “Black Earth, WI,” took them furthest afield, like a long drive where you see parts of the country you didn’t know were there. A long guitar solo in the middle of the track wanders with no particular destination in mind until it arrives exactly where it’s supposed to be, the rest of the band locking in around it. The effect could remind one of jam bands, yes, but also of the unconscious cerebral shiftings of psych rock, where every instrument lysergically trembles a little outside of itself.
In the opening moments of Singin’ to an Empty Chair, the new Ratboys record, you sense that the band’s not only finally arrived where it’s supposed to be, but that the limits of its sound are boundless there. The first track, “Open Up,” forms like a landscape on canvas: gentle bruisings of guitar, a little overexposed with light, warm like the air over broken skin, as frontwoman Julia Steiner’s voice wavers like branches in a breeze. Her sentiment feels bravely, nakedly vulnerable: an invitation into communion. “Pick all the locks inside our heads/It takes a while in your defense/But I’ve got lots of time,” she sings. “What’s it gonna take to open up tonight?”
The album returns to this question often, like it can’t quite get it off its mind, and several of its songs deal with some kind of rupture in communication or connection. For instance, in “Anywhere,” about how sometimes the person to whom you attach yourself most fiercely is the one with the most fitful presence in your life; or in “Light Night Mountains All That,” about trying to show somebody something cool and its coolness failing to move them beyond indifference or distraction, probably because they are thinking about something or someone else; or, in the record’s spiritual centerpiece, “Just Want You to Know the Truth,” about discovering that someone you’ve known forever is different from the person you thought they were, uncovering the degree to which our realities can be made of myths we’ve been provided with or have constructed ourselves.
To this interrogation of the self and others and of feelings bottled up for so long that they’ve started to go bad, Ratboys bring their best, most compositionally advanced songs, moving from tightly wound indie pop to the serene hammock sway of country rock to territories far dreamier and uncertain. Their performances are varied and versatile without feeling like a different band has taken over each song. This is the second time they’ve been recorded by Chris Walla, who, as he did with his former band Death Cab for Cutie, generates miles of atmosphere from what fundamentally sounds like a band playing indie rock music. On “Burn It Down,” you can almost feel the smoke coming off their instruments, like flint striking steel.
“Burn It Down" is part of a penultimate three-song suite in which Ratboys are at their most ambitious, each track exceeding five minutes, each arranged so that their structures shift like bends in a road. “What’s Right?” shares the journeying feeling of “Black Earth, WI,” though it’s a little more enervated, trying to shake off that thing it can’t stop thinking about. A great deal of the music on Singin’ to an Empty Chair feels engineered for a road trip to nowhere, where the place you’re driving toward looks identical to the one you just left, and your thoughts migrate to half-asleep regions they wouldn’t ordinarily go. Nothing resolves, just reels outward as far as you can see.
This is where “What’s Right?” ends up in its second half; as a corresponding chord change darkens the sky, Steiner’s lyrics sleepwalk into a dream state where she meets parts of herself that resist understanding. “My subconscious is a man,” she sings, “He softly says to me/‘I’ll vanish when you need me to/I’ll hold you when you sleep.’” As in a dream, the lyrics resist literal sense, even though they seem to say something about reality that is otherwise inexpressible: “Break all your concentration/Love yourself/End these thoughts of desperation/Embrace Hell.”
The record’s emotional core is located in a far more domestic scene, though it’s no less given to sudden traumatic shifts: “Just Want You to Know the Truth,” addressed to a family member from whom Steiner is estranged, depicts their evolving and devolving relationship in broken fragments of memory, some warm, some lonely and confused, all of them insufficient to explain what’s happened. “If I told you I was OK/Well, that would have been a lie/So I blocked your telephone/Without sayin’ goodbye,” Steiner sings, distorted guitars growing over the song like weeds over something demolished. “Well, it’s not what you did/It’s what you didn’t do.”
In “Just Want You to Know the Truth,” Steiner imagines sitting across from this person and telling them everything she’s feeling. Last year, not long after a breakup, I found myself on the couch in my living room, monologuing to the air in front of me, where I imagined my ex sitting and listening. I told the air things I didn’t know my ex would ever get to hear, things I might’ve decided not to tell her anyway. I cried. My behavior may have alarmed my roommates. But in the midst of this outpouring, I realized, several months before we actually reconnected, that my ex and I would be friends, that this would be a new kind of intimacy for us, and its newness would make our connection mysterious and exciting again.
To encounter this approach on Singin’ to an Empty Chair a year after I’d tried it myself, this lonely reckoning with the unknowability of others and the difficulty and pain in trying to repair relationships, staggered me a little. Are we all trying this hard to restore something we’ve lost? Inside are we just empty houses haunted by the people we used to know? Singin’ to an Empty Chair offers the encouraging thought that there’s something worthy and worthwhile in trying, in reaching out, even if it’s just you alone in your living room, talking to your memory of them.
