My first inkling that Our House on the Hill would find the Babies offering something of a middle-ground between country music and their debut's kinetic garage rock came in January, at Downtown Manhattan's storied Clocktower Gallery. There I watched them perform on the occasion of a Western-themed multimedia exhibit, "Canyon Candy", which included cacti, a coyote, and audio samples of yodeling. The band, fronted by Woods bassist Kevin Morby alongside Vivian Girls' Cassie Ramone, played with a projection of the 1984 drama Paris, Texas, and for a portion of the set Morby wore a cowboy hat.
While the Babies' first record pushed lines on mortality and social anxiety through a compressed, grainy filter, Hill feels more open and vital. The Babies' warm fuzz, captured at Woods' Rear House Studios, tended to mask the album's greatest asset-- its lyrics. Proper polish from an L.A. studio has cleared that up, and they've added an array of instrumental flourishes without straining too hard for maturity. Here, the Babies bend an ear towards Jimmie Rodgers, Everly Brothers, and Lee Hazlewood, along with Southern blues and gospel ("Lord"-summoning abound). Morby can be an expert storyteller as he waxes existential and sings tales of subterranean danger, slippery romance, drunken rebels; he variously offers funny colloquialisms or cutting desolation. We're left with a dense caricature of American counterculture, in constant movement towards dreams, thrills, or vice.
Take the criminally infectious "Mess Me Around", which chronicles the dead-end aftermath of an ill-fated encounter with illusory tricksters. "I dreamt of the hell to come, if I didn't wake up and run," Morby sings with escalating, tongue-in-cheek paranoia, his corrupted character "swimming in a pool of blood" while "straining at the Texas sun." The scenario takes the fictionalized outlaw ballad to an absurd extreme. Who knows why the roughnecks did Morby in, but by nature there's amusement to be found with pistol-pointing rebels and their disregard of mainstream morale. Similarly liberated, "Alligator" puts forth a loveless character with no job to pay rent; here Morby also works in what Lester Bangs called "the Lou Reed 'I walked to the chair/ Then I sat in it' school of lyrics," dispassionately offering, "Life is funny/ Life's a laugh/ Life is lonely/ It's a drag," celebrating the multitudes before a light-hearted turn: "I like your hair/ How do ya do it?"
Hill, then, can be unpredictably humorous. The call-and-response of "Chase It to the Grave" spouts a wry hillbilly line about falling in a ditch, centered on the archetypically American conquest of achieving one's dream. Conversely, the spooked and angry "Moonlight Mile"-- title culled from the road-weary 1971 Stones ballad-- chugs onward with a defeated promise of freedom, at a troubled site where the sky's limits are closed and dreams are broken. Morby's enraged narrator, a Billy the Kid-type "soul-slinger", is self-reliant in his pursuit of railroad escape: "And that's the train that I'm on/ If you don't want on, then get off/ It's just who I am." When he finally stares us down, wondering if our train's got direction-- "What train are you traveling on? Is it lost into the dark?"-- it sounds profound.
Morby's just as strong a popsmith when taking on simple matters; a fed-up late-night question of lust on the trotting "Get Lost", or "On My Teams"s lovelorn yearning. But Ramone's easy "baby baby" rhymes pale in comparison to the lyrical ambition found across the record, as does the lackadaisical "See the Country", which tries at making a poem of the majestic American landscape. And while Morby's acoustic "Mean" gets at the universal feeling of wanting the annoying kid at the party to shut the fuck up-- individualism needs skepticism-- it's too precious.
Other tracks in straight singer-songwriter mode are easy highlights. "Wandering" reflects on leaving home and the romantic notion of being born anew-- America's primary fantasy-- with a lonely stillness that treads passion and tension. Morby stretches out the song's epiphany-- "Become-- what? Become-- what? Become who you are"; it's an especially apt topic for 2012, as internet culture insists on connections to the burdensome past and hinders self-reinvention. Meanwhile "That Boy" is a harrowing strummer in the form of a traditional blues ballad, with piercing inner demons: "My best friend died/ Don't you see?/ His mother came and lied down next to me." The verse, overpowering and raw, leads into some terrifyingly human poetry: "Sometimes I get so scared that I can't breathe/ And the ground moves right out from beneath my feet/ And the sky's hanging low to the trees." It's not hard to see why.
Since forming in 2008, the Babies have had a trying time escaping the context of Vivian Girls, Woods, and the questions of "lo-fi" those groups still curiously carry. But songs like "That Boy" offer a more illuminating origin story; Babies were born following the death of a mutual bandmate and friend. The backstory appears between the sunshine ripchords of their debut "Meet Me in the City" single, cutting its New York romanticism with funereal descriptions of "a church cross town," hospital walls, shitty feelings. These songs emphasize the band's emotional capabilities. Though imperfect, Hill's intensifying sonic clarity presents the Babies as a group that still believes in rock'n'roll as a powerful language, one that can help sort out mortal complexities and say something about the way we live.
