Have we had Holopaw wrong all these years? The Gainesville, Fla.-based band's first two albums were lumped in with the indie Americana crowd, thanks as much to their rustic instrumentations as to singer John Orth's 2002 collaboration with Isaac Brock. But a few years and a label change later, now they seem a band apart, loners entrenched in no particular scene but their own. Even the recognizable elements on their third album, Oh, Glory. Oh, Wilderness., sound slightly askew. The warble in Orth's voice, more pronounced here, is too high-pitched to ever be mistaken for Conor Oberst; the drawling pedal steel is more mood-setting than alt-countrifying; and the band arrive at insinuating hooks not with pop GPS, but with the patient wanderlust to know that each song will coalesce into something expressive and affecting.
Holopaw's indieward progression from Sub Pop in one corner of the country to Bakery Outlet in the other only reasserts their peculiarities and idiosyncrasies, and if Oh, Glory isn't their most immediately commanding album, it's most definitely their Holopaw-est-- and a grower to boot, relinquishing a few more mysteries with each listen. Gone are the grafted-on electronica elements of their self-titled 2003 debut and the shambling settings of their 2005 follow-up, Quit+/or Fight. Instead, the band has developed a livelier sound that fluctuates between the looseness of Pavement and the melodic focus of Death Cab. The change in sound mirrors a change in line-up: Following Quit, most of the band members split, leaving core duo Orth and Jeff Hays to carry on. They rounded out Holopaw with a new rhythm section that moves these songs along at a more rambunctious pace, a new guitarist who doodles curlicues all over the songs, and a cellist who adds sweeping undercurrents to Orth's melodies.
Oh, Glory tries to take in every style of music from Seattle to Gainesville, although Holopaw aren't merely shuffling through geographical traditions. They take many different avenues and incorporate many different styles, but nothing leads them too far from a unified sound. Horns form the bedrock of "Little Stallion With a Glass Jaw" and "Oh, Glory", suggesting neither Memphis nor New Orleans; with their fades, crescendos, and fanfares, they're more akin to Athens' Elephant 6 bands. Rangey guitars spike "The Lazy Matador", but it's the fluttering of Jody Bilinski's cymbal trill that drives the song to its measured finale. The band members bark out encouragement on "P-a-l-o-m-i-n-e" and "Black Lacquered Shame", their voices propelling the songs as forcefully as the rhythm section.
Compared to the newfound breadth of Holopaw's sound, Orth's lyrics remain often startlingly specific, striving for a soft-spoken poetry that reads on the page as well as it sounds aloud. His imagery is striking and crisp. On "The Lazy Matador", he recalls a lover who smells "like changing rooms, unbridled afternoons and horseplay and towel-whips and bathing suits rolled down off sunless hips." On "The Art Teacher and the Little Stallion" a teacher inspires a crush when he tucks in a student's shirt and smoothes his hair for a visit to the Met.
At times these songs approach Decemberistic levels of self-conscious erudition, but Orth is more restrained and less storybookish than Colin Meloy. Oh, Glory is motivated by desires thwarted and passions unrequited, and Orth's practiced quaver conveys an appropriate urgency and renders these songs as breathless inner monologues. For many listeners, his mannered delivery may prove as off-putting as Oberst's own vibrato, but for these songs, it sounds fittingly evocative, as if only he could sing them. In fact, no other band but Holopaw could have dreamed up this album.
