Hospitality: "Eighth Avenue"

Indie rock these days: a knotty pursuit. At least in the sense that we’re all doomed to die forgotten and have our individuating failures marinade in a bowl of murmured criticisms, other people’s synth-presets, our own self-loathing, and spiritually redemptive narrative arcs gleaned from The O.C.. In that sense, he who affords the best costume-designer wins. (Alright? Lana Del Rey wins.) He who rhapsodizes about Patchouli wins. He who sings, “I long for you, quite tenderly,” then sings, “Bitch, that’s my dick, that’s my dick, that is my dick,” before finishing with something warped to incomprehension by effects? Wins! And what about he who was given his unique musical nous via a spectacularly destructive life event? He who sings with the soulfulness of a 911 call? Well, and what about he who has made music a medium for music videos about picture-books? The guy who doesn’t even know what Patchouli is: what about him?

Answer is who gives a shit. Answer is valid, in this case, because, in the midst of everybody’s privately-controlled 24-hour radio station sending out massive opinions about, like, status updates—in the midst of compelling evidence that indie-rock sucks, basically—Hospitality have put out one of the best indie rock records I’ve ever heard. Like, the thing is Streethawk (2001)-level good, which is to say that Hospitality doesn’t front on its hooks, but neither does it abuse you with them either. So it’s kinda like hospitality, haw-haw.

A song like “Eighth Avenue,” the album’s opener that I’m trying not to call “rollicking,” is the perfect illustration of this. A rollicking back-beat, an out-of-control rhythm section, and guitars that sound like airplanes: “Eighth Avenue” sounds like none of these things, but I’m still compelled to say its mix of doe-eyed hooks and instruments that are sort of calmly doing their thing while the chorus is already hypnotising you into playing this again…I’m still compelled to call it “rollicking.” (Sorry guys!)

Amber Papini has an insulated way about her singing (i.e. it’s husky) but she comes across as a good friend after a sharp whiskey, not so much lying to you about jail sentences she’s narrowly avoided in a small town in another life as she’s carping to you about the dumb guy next-door, some weird self-made shit she saw on the Internet, and, most importantly, what twenty-two feels like. And who many ways does it feel like what it feels like? (Hospitality puts it that twenty-two feels like ten really well-written songs.) Papini has serious storytelling verve and her delivery is nothing less than engaging, but it’s the band’s effort that really puts this one over. “Eighth Avenue” just sounds so refreshingly un-jaded in a scene that doesn’t do anything but even when it’s trying not to! It’s a fucking good song, too.