After a late summer heat wave, it’s finally begun cooling down here in Lincoln, to the point where I’ve actually felt the need to don a pullover before stepping outside. As an added bonus, it’s been grey, overcast, and rainy all week long. In other words, it’s now the perfect time to break out some Hood and enjoy their chilly, pastoral take on post-rock.
Wetherby’s finest weren’t always so pastorally minded, though. Their earliest releases, like 1996’s Silent ’88, were scrappy, lo-fi affairs that were heavily indebted to Sonic Youth’s cacophony, with only a few hints at the atmospherics that would come to haunt their later albums. Said atmospherics didn’t really manifest themselves until the Matt Elliott-produced Rustic Houses, Forlorn Valleys, which Domino released in 1998.
Indeed, listen no further than opening track “S.E. Rain Patterns,” a nearly ten-minute piece that’s all pensive brooding and slow burn, and perfectly captures the mood of the album’s title (which would be dreadfully on the nose for most bands). The song’s first half is comprised mostly of vaguely ominous drones and a stark scattering of piano that presage both the coming autumn chill and falling leaves tossed about by the wind. Other instruments slowly make their presence known: tentative guitars, a plodding bass line, brushed drums, and even a mournful woodwind for good measure.
Finally, at the halfway point, the vocals come in. But in the Hood tradition, they’re almost an afterthought, these cryptic and awkward mumblings about “sympathetic skies,” “forgotten worlds,” and “lost and windy autumn afternoons.” The song picks up the pace during its mopey chorus (“Forget the dreams you had/The times that you felt lost”) in a manner that recalls Hood’s earlier recordings. But even then, some aspect of the song still feels like it’s not completely, fully there.
Hood’s music, ever since I first heard 1999’s The Cycle of Days and Seasons, has always possessed this ambiguity for me, as if some vital part of the music remains stuck in some other place. Like the band, even as they holed up in the studio, were daydreaming about meandering walks under endless grey skies, long walks that took them through autumn-browned meadows and past ivy-covered hamlets, and that yearning was somehow psychically captured onto the tape.
Whatever the explanation, the resulting music is always beguiling, and it speaks to me on a deep, perhaps even genetic level whenever the mercury starts to dip, the skies begin to darken, and the air grows crisp and brittle.