Think back to your first loves-- the first records you loved, that is (this is Pitchfork after all). Maybe you were fortunate enough to have a savvy older sibling turn you on to things. Or maybe you were just born with preternatural good taste, and as such all your old faves remain unimpeachable. But chances are you're more like the rest of us: The older you get, and the more you expand your so-called musical horizons, the more some of those records that initially rocked your socks off start to reveal themselves as a little less than essential. Perhaps even-- like the phrase "rock your socks off"-- a little embarrassing.
This is why the Mars Volta move so much product, but it also helps illustrate why, for the right listener at the right time, Australian duo An Horse's debut album Rearrange Beds could be a revelation. Seasoned listeners will have encountered plenty of this brand of tight, dynamic indie rock before. And indeed the setup here is bracingly simple-- guitar/vocal and drums/tambourine/backing vocals-- and doesn't vary by much more than a melodica cameo and an effects pedal or two over the course of the record's 10 tracks. It's not so much what Kate Cooper (the guitarist/vocalist) and Damon Cox (the drummer/backing vocalist) do with these elements, however, as how they do it that sets Rearrange Beds apart.
Cooper and Cox's project was born out of some impromptu jam sessions at a record shop they both worked at, and the record is rife with the sort of urgent energies one might expect from a moment of creative genesis. Whether it's the sexual frustration conveyed in "Camp Out" ("You wanna camp out," Cooper sings, "and I want to screw around in the dark.") or the precarious perch alluded to in "Shoes Watch" (those shoes, it turns out, are watching from a rooftop), there's always a sense of something at stake.
Which, hey, kinda sounds like emo. And indeed, in another band's hands, this could very well be an emo record. The lyrics read like excerpts from diary entries, and most find Cooper addressing an unnamed "you" with a tone of concern bordering on desperation. There are also plenty of collegiate-level cleverisms. Some work: the eighth track, which finds Cooper and Cox repeating "I'm not really scared," is titled "Scared as Fuck". And then a central line in the title track-- "Rearrange beds to make sure thoughts/ Flow straight from my house to yours"-- conjures the same sort of youthful escapism as the Arcade Fire's "Neighborhood #1" bit about digging a tunnel between two dwellings, shot through with a touch of the desperation that keeps An Horse's music riveting. Other attempts at cleverness leave a bad taste in the mouth, such as Cooper's closing track claim "I've had a little too much to think" or a line about "bones that ache with things that you can't spell" (also from the title track), which both sound a little too much like they could be Minus the Bear song titles.
More often, though, lyrics fall somewhere in the middle, neither particularly offensive to one's sensibilities nor particularly inspiring. But again, it's how An Horse use their chosen tools that makes the difference. A chorus like "It's okay to fall down/ It's okay to crumble" won't elicit any epiphanies on paper, but the conviction with which Cooper sings it just might. And when she follows that by declaring "I've seen this before," you believe her. Indeed, most of the tracks on Rearrange Beds build to anthemic choruses that practically beg for sing-alongs-- and the scores of disaffected teens and twentysomethings required to sing them. And when you can turn your own moment of catharsis into somebody else's, hey, you must be doing something right.
