The Canadian band’s third album is a wistful and familiar soundtrack to winter malaise.
Living Hour hail from Winnipeg, Manitoba—a city they describe as an “inland island that floats on infinite prairie ground”—and their lush pop songs speak as much to their own rural isolation as the universal, endemic kind. It’s a duality that shows up in many forms on their third album, Someday Is Today, which nods at mid-aughts indie while trudging into cathedral pop akin to Beach House. The terrain isn’t new, nor is it particularly varied. But at their best, Living Hour offer a soundtrack to malaise that feels both timeless and timely.
Built on Sam Sarty’s smoky vocals, the strongest songs on Someday Is Today lead with magnetic atmosphere and melodies, venturing briefly into fuzz and dissonance only to return to an earworm. Though these songs were recorded over a seven-day span in the depths of winter, as temperatures dropped to negative 30, many have the warm quality of a story whispered over dark liquor in a corner booth, confessional and intimate. “December Forever” opens with a progression of insistent chords and plinking keys before introducing a catchy, hummable refrain: “You get what you want/Make it an afterthought,” Sarty sings, somewhere between resignation and disdain. Slow-burning opener “Hold Me in Your Mind” soars rafter-high on reverberating keys and cinematic, carouseling harmonies, with eerie descriptions of headlights, satellites, and surveillance. The warbling final notes could be emanating from a UFO or the console of a car parked across a dark, empty lot.
Other tracks evoke a 20-year-old indie pop heyday that feels pleasantly familiar. “Feelings Today,” a duet with Jay Som, hearkens to fellow Canadians Broken Social Scene, while the duet on “Exploding Rain” pays homage to Yo La Tengo’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. But Living Hour’s lyricism studs these recognizable sounds with unexpected gems, lending songs like “Lemons and Gin” additional luster. “A hundred watts in every bulb above my head/Dandruff on each shoulder again/I’m staring at the frozen meat with polished floors,” Sarty sings, establishing a physical landscape that feels as freezer-burned as her emotional one. Winter comes up often, fittingly for a prairie record. “I remember walking home on ice,” Sarty recalls on “Middle Name,” while the title of “December Forever” is less an endorsement of the month than a lament.
Elsewhere, the potency falters and the emotional through-line gets derailed. “Miss Miss Miss,” with its “Sexual Healing” drum machine intro, is a weird bossa nova paean to a nightclub, a tonal disjunct from the material that bookends it. “Hump,” meanwhile, rests on a strange middle ground between sludgy minimalism and brightness. Living Hour often tow a successful line between disaffectedness and melancholy, but the record’s sharp edges arrive when they lean too far in either direction, reading as lethargy or sentimentalism. Still, to everything there is a season, and Someday is Today mostly succeeds in its paeans to frostbitten numbness, its flatness as wistful as the rolling plains and as familiar as the freezer aisle.
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