The Los Angeles quartet’s new record turns to nature and childhood past by blending plaintive psychedelic rock with sweet folk melodies.
Childhood can feel powerfully dramatic as you stumble across one revelation after another, and even insignificant discoveries may stay in our minds decades after they occur—a broken playground swing that nobody repaired, your first taste of a candy you now detest. Kenny Becker, frontman of the Los Angeles quartet Goon, wanders around such memories on the group’s second record, Hour of Green Evening. A noticeably softer record than Goon’s 2019 debut, Heaven is Humming, and recorded with a completely new lineup aside from Becker himself, Goon glide through sweet indie-folk numbers as though they’ve been doing this for years.
Building on Paint by Numbers, Vol. 1, an EP of hazy pandemic recordings released earlier this year, Hour of Green Evening is a wistful record that blends plaintive psychedelic rock with lilting melodies and arrangements. Becker sings folk tales about his childhood, peering beyond the blissful innocence of those early years to notice the quiet solitude in the nature around him. The rest of Goon—along with an assist from Spoon’s Alex Fischel on keys—add to the scenery, conjuring the same idyllic dreams that Becker describes. “In a past life you softly slept through waking hours/And in the boughs/Beams of sound play a welcoming,” he sings in lead single “Angelnumber 1210,” his voice floating lazily as drums and guitar keep a steady pace.
Nature is the throughline to these memories, as Becker treats every mention of greenery or the weather with gentle care and sweeping grandeur. In “Another Window,” he croons about nighttime blooming “over the ivy in a row”; on “Buffalo,” the sight of hedges on a sidewalk remind him of “sharing grassy knees” with someone from his past. These references turn folkloric on “Wavy Maze,” a standout that recalls the band’s grungier material. Dizzying and dissonant, the track sounds like a dark Grimm fairy tale with its plodding guitars and oscillating synths, contrasting blurring recollections with gothic descriptions. “When I was small/Saria’s ageless song played along,” Becker sings, referencing the in-game journey of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The song builds in intensity, carrying on its mystic path before climaxing with a scream of pent up frustration.
Hour of Green Evening might have benefited from more of that wilder teenage thrall, but for the most part, what the music lacks in rowdiness it makes up for in emotional complexity. “Emily Says” carries the adolescent anger of “Wavy Maze” into adulthood as Becker sings of a depression that persists in a loving marriage: “Emily says, ‘Hope still appears’/And though I know in my heart it’s right/Feeling like hurting myself tonight,” he laments while his voice moves toward a soothing peak. Looking back into memories brings up these types of contradictions—we remember a detail that someone else might not, or we reinterpret feelings of events long after they end. Goon takes these nuances into account and chooses to embrace the memory anyway.
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