Back with their first music since the record, The Phone Booth have just put out a brand new single, ‘Happier at Home’. Very much following in the spirit of the previous record, the song is a morose creeper of tune, dragging itself reluctantly through the slow opening half with a mixture of disinterest and foreboding. “Embracing the stable life,” sings lead Michael Easbey, capturing the contemporary mood in a few simple lines. “I’m polishing shoes at night / The walk is an easy thought / But in practice it’s not.”

The temptation is read into the single as a COVID tune, and the timing is certainly notable in that respect, be it by design or coincidence. But the truth is that ‘Happier at Home’ is about something deeper than any one crisis, a more general malaise made all the more apparent by the pandemic. The tortured cocktail of emotions that is life under the conditions of late capitalism. Its cruel, paradoxical state. A deep boredom, a constant anxiety, the pressure to live a certain way met with the equal and opposite terror of betraying one’s self in order to see it through. The relief of acting against the expectations, the guilt that never leaves you alone.

Thought I was always missing something
Well I’m happier at home
Stealing the notes that all cascade from them
Without you when you’re gone
Sealing the notice from the table
Who says I’m better off?
Gather the one pure outcome I glean when I kill my thoughts

The post The Phone Booth – Happier at Home appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The record, which has now been released, is not a bona fide concept album, though is dedicated to the Easbey’s late best friend Steven Roman Gonzales, and is built around voicemail recordings of his words. With plain simplicity lended weight by hindsight, the samples anchor the thematic resonance of the songs and provide a counterpoint to their frustration and confusion. This is an album about loss, yes, but more than that, it is a testament to the quiet joy of friendship. As Max Burke describes in the press release: “The existence of Roman is a direct rebuttal to Gonzales’ skepticism from years before—a meticulous, candid and tender exultation.”

After the poignant opening sample of Gonzales in ‘Radio Silence’, ‘The Freshman’ breaks out with a wistful energy, Gonzales’ words haunting the lulls in instrumentation, and the growing ‘Boston + Santa Cruz’ applies a tender restraint. The tracks set the tone of the record, where loss is matched by an equal and opposite sense of luminosity, as though for all of the suffering, the shining truth of the relationship—that it was challenging and special—refuses to fade to black.

As we described in our preview, ‘Ballad of Indifference’ is a “slow burning slice of lo-fi rock, the smoulder eventually drawing flame which quickly transforms into a hectic blaze of emotional release,” and follow up ‘Swim in Oceans’ “bursts into life from the ashes” in a rattling frenzy that brings to mind No Age. Though employing different strategies, both tracks are a testament to the transcendent catharsis of movement and energy, as though to register pain as motion and noise is to make it more manageable, less opaque and enveloping.

Representing something of a centrepiece for the record, ‘Healthcare’ approaches this idea most directly. Opening with Gonzalez’s uncomfortably direct questioning of Easbey’s dedication to making music, the song develops into a slow-burning love song that’s shows a strange blend of critical and caring that only love can offer, putting to bed the prior accusations in a kind of tortured, elated retrospection.

The spacious beginnings of ‘Dust’ herald the most patient and understated track of the record, every promise of crescendo or breakdown never quite coming to fruition, and, despite its clear heft, follow-up ‘Ghost’ could be described in much the same way. Rising from ominous feedback and marching drums that bring to mind The Twilight Sad’s unsettling rhythms, the track has a magnetic pull that drags Easbey’s vocals toward what is surely a climactic breakdown, though again the song plateaus before this precipitates.

To crown the album, The Phone Booth offer ‘Comfortable’ as one final epic simmer, where conflicting emotions—confusion and certainty, fondness and loss—centre on the final moments of palliative care. If the simplicity and forthright nature of the lyrics bring into relief the reality of the situation, then the soaring sound shows reality in all of its human depth and fervour, a desperation that will never end, impermanence as the everlasting experience.

Roman is out now and you can get it from the Phone Booth Bandcamp page.

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