Review Summary: It's enough.
It’s been a little over two years now since
Home, Like NoPlace Is There put the Central Massachusetts emo outfit The Hotelier on the map, and deservingly so.
Home was a record inspired by grief, attempting to grasp the goodness in life and watching as the people around you were falling apart and struggling to do the same. It was a tour de force of catharsis and confusion, guilt and sorrow. The band, as if getting the formula for relentlessly catchy yet intensely grim tunes down to a science, rarely if ever took a wrong step with
Home. It was a perfect storm, lightning in a bottle, call it what you will. Anchored by Christian Holden’s intimate lyricism and the group’s propulsive songwriting, all its pieces flowed naturally and supported one another, culminating in what remains one of the best records I’ve heard in recent years.
As the band made explicitly clear in the lead-up to their follow-up
Goodness though, times have changed. People have moved on. You can’t live in agony forever, and it’s not healthy to feign it either.
Goodness, as its title implies, is certainly lighter than
Home lyrically, and while the latter rarely felt instrumentally oppressive,
Goodness nonetheless manages to carry with it a noticeable glimmer. Though the previous subject matter of Holden’s lyricism has been scrapped, his ability to churn out detailed, close, and poetic heaps of lines has not.
Goodness isn’t obnoxiously optimistic and there’s no lack of tension, but it’s decisively not a life or death affair. As Holden explains, “on this one, I wanted to force people into a place of being calm and a little bit off balance. I was messing with silence. I was literally thinking for some of the songs, ‘how do I make this feel more natural?’ And then ***ing with that.”
Which isn't an inherently misguided idea, but in the process, something was lost here, and it certainly wasn’t the lyrics’ craftsmanship. Rather, the lazy open-sounding tunings and lack of effective dynamics in several songs give off the impression that they’re meandering, and to make up for that manipulation in dynamics, the record is interspersed with unnecessary bells and whistles, few of which ever feel like they contribute to something greater than the sum of their parts. The extra snare hits of "Goodness Pt. 2," "You In This Light’s" skippy outro, and the interludes which foreshadow or call back to previous passages all exist for the sake of experimentation and experimentation only, failing to further any vital element to the record’s overall cohesiveness. To make matters more frustrating, Goodness is shamelessly front-loaded with these problems; the spoken-word introduction even guitarist Chris Hoffman has stated he dislikes and the sluggish monotonous beginnings to "Goodness Pt. 2" and "Piano Player" fail to really kick the record off with a bang and think they’re more clever than they actually are, while "Two Deliverances" and the dated "Settle The Scar" settle for being slightly above average indie rock tunes and not much more.
Where
Goodness really picks up is the criminally underrated "Opening Mail For My Grandmother;" in addition to conveying one of Holden’s more obvious and relatable sentiments, the music, melodies, and lyrics finally come together as something wholly cohesive and outstanding for the first time on the record. Shortly after, "Soft Animal," already widely lauded as one of the band’s best tracks to date, rises and falls with moving drum work and a chorus refrain about witnessing a deer that somehow feels no less existential than calling in sick to a funeral or sleeping for years on end. "You In This Light" and "Fear of Good," as relatively brief as they are, throw in two of the catchiest moments on the record with contrasting musical extremes, the former one of
Goodness’ least predictable tracks, the latter a piano-centered segue into its final cut.
On that note, "End of Reel" (and "Sun" before it) showcase the most potential from The Hotelier yet; upwards of 6 minutes long apiece, these two standouts ebb and flow at a pace that feels more confident and comfortable than draggy and climax into two of the best moments the band has ever penned. "Sun" nearly all but vanishes to a whisper after an opening few minutes of syncopated rhythms and certified emo™ licks only to re-emerge in crashing waves of cathartic melodrama. And for all of the album’s earlier inconsistency,
Goodness doesn’t bumble around with its finale - "End of Reel" takes a more subdued entrance and initially lets Holden steal the show before flowing into a marvelous chorus and speeding up for one final grasp of energy. Even with no words, the vulnerability and emotion of these closing moments are practically tangible.
Scattered with good songs and even greater ideas, where
Goodness ultimately falters is that it doesn’t effectively feel best listened to as an album - it’s too lopsided, too unnecessarily concerned with tricks the band hasn't mastered yet, and not the ideal step
forward in songwriting for the band coming off an almost faultless predecessor. But it’s far from a complete blunder either; the feeling of goodness rarely hits like a bullet train, and for this era of The Hotelier, their charm is in small, universal, and stirring moments, something
Goodness retains plenty of, even when the bits that surround them are less than perfect. They’re in the confusingly relaxed urgency of “I don’t know if I know love no more” and the cries of “I couldn’t ask this of you,” among others, and by extension, I’m sure they’ll function as well as intended as a step
sideways out of the mist for anyone still reeling from distress. It’s not a permanent fix and there’s no epiphany or revelation here. Goodness just is. I see it and it sees me. And you know what? That’s enough.
