Hiss Golden Messenger leader MC Taylor has been at this for a minute. He first landed on the Scene’s radar playing a show in a Murfreesboro loft during the George W. Bush administration, when people were throwing around phrases like “New Weird America” and taking blogs seriously.
Taylor and Hiss Golden Messenger have now been making albums for Merge Records, the indomitable indie-rock label, for almost a decade. HGM’s latest, Jump for Joy, has a sort of autumnal motorik that rides on the rush of heat from a freshly stoked campfire, a propulsion that gives the record a laid-back, cozy intimacy. Hiss Golden Messenger will play Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl on Thursday in support of the August release.
“It’s just pushing the stone up the hill,” Taylor says of making records. “You push it up a little bit. It rolls backwards a little bit. You push it up some more. As long as you don’t completely despise the stone, I think it’s OK.”
Jump for Joy’s production is imbued with the aesthetic wow and flutter of ferric oxide stretched by years of rewinds, pauses and plays. It’s a sound that brings emotional resonance along with it — the emotional investment of analog-era obsessions. The decay and abstraction of “Alice” give way to the ’80s Glenn Frey-ism of “I Saw the New Day in the World” and “Shinbone,” the latter of which falls somewhere near the sound of a hand-spliced Dire Straits dub.
HGM is a band unafraid to throw in a Steely Dan-style kitchen-sink chord progression — a progression that feels almost wrong until it feels just right. While the production sounds like moments lost in time, Taylor’s lyrics are built from wisps of emotion and flashes of memory. Taylor has a Lowell George-like ability to set a scene, and his songs feel as though they’ve been unmoored from the timestream and could jam off into the ether at a moment’s notice. The songs on Jump for Joy are itching to be played live, to find their way to some taper’s mic.
“There was a lot of intention with this record to create a set of songs that could all be played live,” Taylor tells the Scene. “I understand now, having made many records, that there are songs that for one reason or another, just aren’t going to get played live. And so when I was writing the material for Jump for Joy, I was trying to stack the deck a little bit and create music that actually could all be played live.”
But this isn’t just music for, say, people who have feelings about Brent Mydland — though its blend of folk roots, country charm and experimental excursions will keep your favorite beardo glued to their stereo. Taylor’s relatability — his casual lyrical vulnerability — is easy on the ears. It’s a thread that connects various sonic fabrics — a little choogle here, a little concrete there. The hint of second-line shuffle on the drums of “Jesus Is Bored” and the way the melody percolates like a cup of Café du Monde just before sunrise tap into an energy that transcends subculture and genre alike.
“I definitely was spurred on by this realization that I think a lot of us are having, meaning this idea of creating work that wears some type of positivity or hope on its sleeve,” says Taylor. “I think that’s just kind of in the artistic zeitgeist right now for a lot of people anyway. Because the reality is that this devastating 24-hour-a-day news cycle that we are living with is not going to stop.
“So I think it’s incumbent on the people that care … to offer up different types of frames through which to look at the world,” he continues. “And I feel like I sort of count myself among the people that have the capacity to do that with my work.”
When the band digs in and the melodies take a darker turn, like on the grit-and-gearshifts guitar rev-up “Feeling Eternal” and the laconic grinder “Sunset of the Faders,” you can feel Hiss Golden Messenger keeping the despair at bay. Likewise, when Taylor sings the lyric “jump for joy” on the title track, it’s not a toxic overdose of positivity but a world-weary laugh in the face of cataclysmic circumstances. Jump for Joy is grounded but gorgeous, a thing of beauty that knows how ugly the world can be.
“I’m also a father of two kids, and I need them to understand the potential of hope in the type of world that we seem to be living in, the world that we have created for ourselves,” says Taylor. “It’s sort of like a holistic project for me. It’s in my music, but it’s also with my family. And it’s not something that I’m good at every single day, but it is certainly something that I’m working on.”
