“I was just an Indiana kid, getting no one in my bed,” sings Timothy Showalter, a.k.a. Strand of Oaks, “but I had your sweet tunes to play.” That song, mysteriously titled “JM”, recounts long afternoons spent rebelling against his parents, smoking in his car, hating all his friends, and playing JM’s sweet tunes at presumably high volume. The guitars swell and crash around him, then lumber into the kind of crunchy jam that once upon a time had teenage misfits pumping fists or raising lighters in unison. Given that the song is set in Indiana, JM could conceivably be John Mellencamp, the Hoosier rocker laureate who used to sing about such kids, but in fact Showalter has disclosed the song’s true subject: Jason Molina. “JM” is a moving tale of extreme adolescent alienation, alleviated only by the narrator’s identification with a rock hero, in this case one whose locality as a Midwesterner—and sometime Indianan—makes him all the more relatable, more approachable, more real.
“JM” is the lynchpin on Strand of Oaks’ fourth album, HEAL, in that it shows two different versions of Showalter: the angry, potentially violent teen blasting Songs: Ohia and the adult who now knows Molina’s fate. The song’s power lies not only in its barrage of guitars, but in the sad wisdom gleaned from fallen heroes. On all of these songs, Showalter comes across as the kind of character Molina certainly identified with and occasionally wrote about: a blue-collar, dead-end kid with an uncertain future and some darkness in him. HEAL is an album as memoir: stark and at times emotionally harrowing as it recounts with bracing candor the artist’s struggles with friends, family, and most of all himself. The choruses may swoop and soar, the guitars may churn valiantly, but Showalter’s nostalgia for his own past is never rosy. There are still hints of shame and self-loathing in his voice, as though he is still very much the kid he sings about.
“Shame” and “self-loathing” are not words often used to describe great rock records—at least not those made outside the 1990s, when personal darkness became rock’s eventually tiresome subject matter. The songs on HEAL, however, are more than just therapy sessions; in fact, they reveal an idiosyncratic artist rummaging through his memories to find the source of his art. Opener “Goshen '97”, named after Showalter’s hometown in the northern part of the state, describes his first stabs at making music, buying beat-up Casios, “singing Pumpkins in the mirror” and finding his dad’s tape machine. The details are so vivid you hardly mind that he tries to sneak the line, “That’s where the magic began,” by you. The song describes a lonely kid finding some comfort in music and some camaraderie in his musical idols, so it’s perfectly apt that guitar hero J Mascis (another JM) shreds his way through “Goshen '97”.
HEAL follows the young Showalter through his teenage years and into his twenties, as he becomes, in his own words, “fat, drunk, and mean.” Showalter’s self-assessment can certainly be grizzly (“I was an abomination”), but he couches everything in vivid scenes: stashing porn under the bed, listening to Sharon Van Etten on his headphones, drinking a jug of wine to summon the courage to ask a girl home. This autobiographical mode is unusual for Showalter, who as Strand of Oaks has not mined his own life for material—at least, not to the extent he does here. Rather than rely on the typical confessional models that inform so much indie-rock and -folk songwriting, his earlier songs addressed subjects that rarely, if ever, get sung about. This is a man who penned a revenge fantasy of Dan Ackroyd torturing John Belushi’s dealer. It’s not that those songs were impersonal; rather, they portrayed him as an artist trying to find his reflection in the mirror of the world.
On HEAL, it’s not just the lyrics that are memoiristic, but the music as well. These songs draw on the pop songs of Showalter’s youth—not just Molina’s epic Americana, but also postpunk synth pop and heavy metal. If Strand of Oaks started as a primarily acoustic folk act, it has morphed into something very different. There is lots of pre-grunge guitar on here: some actual shredding and soloing, albeit no showboating. Synths play a much larger role on HEAL, especially on the neon-lit title track and on “Same Emotions”, with its video-game solo on the coda. It’s a way for Showalter to map his own past musically, to fit his memories with a soundtrack based on what might have been playing when he bought that first keyboard or asked that girl out.
There’s a rawness to HEAL, a damaged quality to the music, as though Showalter—who played almost all of the instruments—recorded everything in the old Goshen basement with his first rickety keyboards. The title track burbles with beats and synths that might be described “postpunk” or “motorik”, but really they just sound like a guy fucking around with a Casio. That only makes the whoa-oa-oa’s on “Woke Up to the Light” and closer “Wait for Love” sound too easy, an obvious means of conveying gravity and implying transcendence. Such moments are too similar to the wordless anthemizing of Coldplay, which makes them too public and too current; they break the spell. As a result, the album loses some of its urgency, its specificity, and its narrative thrust as it progresses. But that won’t matter to the angry kid who discovers HEAL and blasts it in his own car.
