Houses are Chicago’s Dexter Tortoriello and Megan Messina. Back in April they released their sophomore album, A Quiet Darkness, a concept album which deals with the experiences “of a couple searching for each other in a post-nuclear apocalypse”. The idea was inspired by a trip the duo took along California’s Highway 10, particularly the abandoned houses which they encountered along the route. The band even went as far as to record much of the percussion samples inside such locations and ended up using snatches of the ambient background noise on the album too.
As the concept suggests, the album is highly cinematic and is doused in melancholy, while neatly side-stepping the epic bombast that would have been easy to create handling such an emotive theme.The album also avoids going too far in the opposite direction. Far from a series of unlistenable dirges, it has a soothing ambience, with much of the violence that is usually associated with such post-apocalyptic scenarios left to the imagination. Think McCarthy’s The Road minus the explicit brutality, all doomed love and snatches of painful sentiments. This is all captured much better than I am able in the beautiful trailer below:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toMrivU0va0]
The resulting sound lands somewhere between the emotionally charged aesthetics of bedroom pop artists such as Arrange and the male-female vocals of Stars or A Weather. I have seen some criticism in reviews regarding the album’s length (around 55 minutes), but I think this is unfair. It is very hard to find an album that so successfully engages the listener in its concept and I found myself lost in this crumbling world for what was almost an entire hour. Listen to my current favourite track, the post-rock influenced ‘Beginnings’, below:
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/74432728″]
A Quiet Darkness is out now on Downtown Records and you can buy it now from most good retailers, or, if you live in North America, get a copy directly from the band during their upcoming tour. Check the dates here.