In a vaporous swirl of voice and emotions, Massachusetts songwriter Woodson Black asks a profound question: Music can always make you feel better, but can it ever make you healed?
You don’t need to pore over the lyrics or backstory of Haux’s Violence in a Quiet Mind to grasp that it’s about depression. It’s right there in Woodson Black’s high, hushed voice, which quakes with swallowed sobs. It’s in his disorienting arrangements—the guitar too close, the drums and synths too far away, constructing a world in which everything intrudes but nothing can be touched. It’s in the persistent unease that haunts his gentle songs, and how even their crescendos suggest a filament flaring brightest the moment before it burns out.
Of course, it’s also in the lyrics, which teem with solitudes and stings as Black reviews painful childhood memories through the lens of lasting vulnerability they instilled. “You’ll never be safe, you’ll never be whole,” he admonishes on “Hold On,” wrenching the syllables through the tiniest aperture of breath. Then, over the course of a subdued but captivating album, he sets out to prove himself wrong. Violence in a Quiet Mind deals with death, addiction and generational trauma, yet it feels uplifting, not depressing. It asks a profound question: Music can always make you feel better, but can it ever make you healed?
Black, who lives in the Berkshires, grew up in rural Massachusetts. His previous work as Haux consists of two EPs, where his R&B-flecked indie electro-pop was easy enough to situate among The xx and Active Child. But Violence in a Quiet Mind is harder to pin down. It has something of the Antlers’ fragile pageantry, of Mas Ysa’s mottled glow, of Bon Iver’s digital forestry. If you remember when Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart made small, harrowing, beautiful songs like “Fabulous Muscles,” then Black might be his benevolent twin. But such comparisons only touch on the immersive, subtle sound that Black has developed with producers Jamie Macneal and Thomas Bartlett (aka Doveman).
Most of the songs are built around close-mic’d acoustic guitar figures, which Black clads in gauzy synths as if he’s dressing a wound. The guitars are plain but rich in character, emphasizing a woody tone and the texture of calluses scraping ridged strings. They serve as material facts for Black to cling to in the vaporous swirl of his voice and emotions. Sparse percussion, provided by Dean Sharenow and Joe Montague, steals in discreetly if at all, while Bartlett’s piano picks a broken path through the shifting patterns of light and shadow. The quiet intensity is never broken, lending small fluctuations large effects, yet Black nudges all this focused stasis toward change, which depression makes a synonym for relief.
When Violence begins with “Hold On,” it’s like all Black can muster is miles of reverb and wisps of music, tenuously held together with stray pins of desperation and will. The next few songs fill out the interior definition, and halfway through, the album hits a new stride. On “Heavy,” probably the crowd-pleaser—you can already hear him doing it solo for encores—the bass and percussion, no longer subterranean rumbles and gusts, slip into a pocket with some swing and romance. The Rhye vibes develop further via the propulsive dream-folk of “Craving,” which flourishes into “Eight,” a lovely duet with Rosie Carney that evokes long-shut curtains being thrown open.
Music can be many kinds of medicine: analgesic, anesthetic, emetic. But even as it soothes, Violence in a Quiet Mind is more concerned with demonstrating how it feels to get better. It takes patience, attention, and self-awareness, qualities Black’s music amply displays. As he pours his tempests into chipped ceramic songs, we can identify with being small, delicate vessels with large, volatile contents, and whether or not we connect with Black’s personal story, we can all use his incantation of forgiveness on the insinuating “Killer” for our purposes. It turns out music can heal, in a way—as a lifeline through and a tally of the work it takes to heal yourself.
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