Dan Knishkowy’s latest Adeline Hotel album, It’s Alright, Just The Same, feels something like the musical equivalent of Fredrick’s words. Produced by Will Stratton, the record is undoubtedly about sad and melancholic things, though almost indirectly so. It’s as if it’s written from a comfortable vantage point, where everything can be viewed in context and with a certain degree of fondness. But, rather than fall headlong into the nostalgic-hindsight trap, Knishkowy clings to the edge and faces upwards, forwards, using past strife as an energising force to colour the present. Opener ‘Oh Well’ is a good example, a slow-burning, almost ironical song about looking back and moving on and ending up being yourself, culminating in a frantic, joyous instrumental.

“I’m going back
Always going back
Can we ever go back?

When you move somewhere, you can be anyone else
But I’ll probably just be myself
Oh well”

As we described when premiering the song, ‘Near You’ is upbeat and carefree, with “a faint sadness linger[ing] between the chords… a gentle melancholia which makes you thankful for what you have and have had”. ‘Lay Low’ has a Molina-esque sparsity while ‘Disarray’ is a bona-fide country song,  loneliness and work woes compounded by a lingering longing for lost love, despite it having been a source of disturbance at the time. ‘So Recognizable’ confronts this problem, the lunacy of missing out on the present because of worries about the past or future.

“Missing all these moments when I’m gone
Every time I hold my breath too long
I always loved away the present tense
Moments just as means to other ends”

If ‘Oh Well’ took a cynical view of the narrator’s position, then ‘My Friend’ serves as the opposite view, a sincere telling of a friend’s trouble, because nothing ignites our belief in hope like the suffering of a loved one (“There’s nothing I can do to help him if he won’t / Let love in a little”). ‘Wonder Why’ is rooted back in the personal, lost amidst a relationship gone sour, longing for the day when the mess can become one of Fredrick’s rose-tinted fantasies (“Then one day we’ll look back and laugh / Til then recoil with no face to the past”). The finger-picked guitar on ‘Magnolia’ ticks over like time itself, the lyrics shocked that seasons pass, though closer ‘Reciprocal Ages’ manages to find a moment of clarity, the aforementioned looking forwards, as though everything preceding this moment was merely a prologue.

“We talked of Big Nothing forever
You laughed when I told you my name
Surprised that I made you feel better
I said “it’s alright, just the same”

It’s Alright, Just the Same is an album of conflict. Conflict between old and new, here and there, him and her. A conflict between the past and the future with the present caught in the crossfire, hopes and heartbreak old and new swirling the narrator’s head so that he can no longer feel the sun on his face. However, through dry humour, other people and plain old chance, Adeline Hotel show that it’s possible the air just might clear now and then, affording a clear view and the feeling that sometimes, just sometimes, this could be a fantastic river to drift along, for a while at least.

It’s Alright, Just The Same is out now and you can buy it digitally from the Adeline Hotel Bandcamp page or on CD/cassette from Wild Kindness.

Album art by Michael Steiner

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Opener ‘Better’ is mumbled to the point of being incoherent, like the an under-the-breath rehearsal for a future encounter, before ‘Problem’ rises from the murk with a laid-back, almost surf-rock feel. However, once the vocals commence it becomes clear that this murk is never fully shaken off, a fine mist which clings to everything, blurring all edges, something we alluded to in our preview post as:

“A general melancholy, a soft insistent sadness which is neither keen nor desperate yet seeps into the very fabric of life, mellowing the highs and lows into something even and detached”

The fact that emotions are buried beneath this fog doesn’t mean they are not there. Indeed, there are moments of great beauty and sorrow across the eleven tracks on the album, small bright points of near-clarity, like the outlines of fish as viewed from above the water’s surface. ‘Favorite’ hints at a feeling both deep and long-lasting, a love or loneliness which fits snugly over real life and never leaves, while ‘Can’t Wait’ packs a certain conviction, as if the narrator has inched his neck above the clouds for the briefest second, viewing his life in third person. Even ‘Try Hard’, as indirect and lost a song you could ever hope to hear, circles around something important and tangible, even if it’s just a desire to be less unclear.

“leave you in the dark sometimes
i am unclear today
take enough to make it home in streetlight
you could not call your dad back then
forgot his name again
i never did try hard”

Because the thing is, however omnipresent it may feel, the melancholy here is the product of the exact opposite. Hope. Taster does not describe a dull-eyed stupor or some mindless, robotic existence. It describes a person missing another, a person subject to feelings of irrational size and weight, so large in fact that they make reality seem flat and grey. This isn’t a Hollywood tale. The other will most likely never come back (hell, they might not even remember his name), and the confusion might never lift. But that is how us humans work. And what’s more human than being confused and sad and refusing still to let go of hope?

Taster is out now via Merdurhaus and Sports Day Records and you can buy it from the Hovvdy Bandcamp page.

Painting by Anja Salonen

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Taster will be released on the 15th April via Merdurhaus and Sports Day Records and you can pre-order it now from the Hovvdy Bandcamp page. The pair will be on tour in the run up to release, so check below to see if they venture out near you.

Hovvdy Tour:
April 5th – Nashville, TN
April 6th – Athens, OH
April 7th – Oberlin, OH
April 8th – Philadelphia, PA
April 9th – New York, NY
April 10th – Brooklyn, NY
April 11th – Washington, DC
April 12th – Richmond, VA
April 13th – Athens, GA
April 14th – New Orleans, LA
April 15th – Austin, TX

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