HOSTS, Hearttaker [Review]

HOSTS

Hearttaker

Sun Blood Records

March 31, 2014

In the city of music, Belmont University is an exaggerated microcosm — the too-cool hipsters aspire to be paradoxically known and unknown, respected and condemned, ignored and yet still earning enough money to pay for their desert boots and vinyl. At their worst, these acoustic guitar-playing burgeoning bourgeois seem to parody a culture that encourages overflowing self-confidence and self-promotion. At their best, well, you have Belmont junior Miles Patzer and his project HOSTS’ debut album Hearttaker.

The album, which took more than two years to record from start to finish, is truly Nashvillian — it was recorded at random houses all over the city, and produced and engineered by fellow Belmont junior Drew Long. Long, according to Patzer, created “professional sounds with non professional spaces.”

The result is a debut that Noisetrade compares to acts like Jason Isbell and Tallest Man on Earth — artists that blend melancholy Americana roots with indie singer-songwriter introspection. Though, of course, it is unfair to judge HOSTS’ first effort by the efforts of those two men.

Patzer brings a lot to the indie-Americana table with his easy-going rasp and lyrics that communicate the exhaustion and confusion of being between 18 and 21. His youth is tinged with a wry, Nietzschean smile that is at once comforting and disconcerting, perfect for an audience of aspirational millennials.

But where Hearttaker succeeds in its lyrics and sound quality it fails in its confidence. Underneath the self-assured Belmont swagger is a shade of defensiveness. When Patzer released the record via Noisetrade, he said in his Facebook page that the album has been a journey of “successes and failures. Of triumphs and rejections. It’s been created in the naive, anxiousness of dorm rooms, and in the cold echoes of an old house. It’s been created in solitude, and surrounded by many. What matters though, is that it was created. And now completed.”

The somewhat unnecessary preface parallels the feel of Hearttaker, which mimics the millennial disease of simultaneous overconfidence and insecurity. HOSTS relies too much on acoustic guitar and vocal breaks to accentuate the supposed heaviness of the lyrics. The album’s dynamic weakness and at times excessive slide guitar make the album feel a little more like John Mayer than Jason Isbell, an effect compounded by the track length, which averages more than five minutes (much too long for anyone except Zeppelin).

Hearttaker is not a bad first effort, and perhaps it’s remarkable because of this. Even though I got the album free via Noisetrade, I like to think I would buy it for its honesty and its potential, for its self-determination as well as its subtle shyness. For its hints at things to come.

It may not live up to Noisetrade's ambitious comparisons, but there’s a sincerity to the work that soothes many of its problems (namely, those six-minute track lengths). The debut tries a little too hard to be sure it’s understood, but in the millennial youth, it’s easy to see why we have to do that, to vouch for our behavior, to prove the authenticity of our voice in a society that tells us we have been babied and as a result, are unable to see our faults.

But as Patzer defiantly sings on the album’s last track, “Well, I’ve got what it takes to be here.”

Stream Hearttaker here, or purchase it

Rating: 3.5/5