Review: Paperhaus - Paperhaus
By Zack Baker, Editorial Director
[Self-released; 2015]
Rating: 6/10
Key Tracks: "Cairo," "Surrender"
You're scrolling through the hottest of the hot underground music blogs, trolling for suggestions for next year's Next Big Thing, as you do. "Wow, this neo-folk-inspired futurebass album sounds pretty bangin'!" you say. "Ugh, another shoegaze-fusion bandwagon band, what is this? 2013? P'shaw," you groan. Then you find a little band called Paperhaus.
Paperhaus isn't trying anything (too) fancy with its self-titled debut. It's just a band writing solid rock songs, laying down a few solos and calling it a day. No attempts to alchemically fuse the hottest sounds of the '60s with something from the band's favorite LCD Soundsystem song--itself an homage to those very same '60s sounds. Just hearing a rock band write rock songs is refreshing, especially in the Bandcamp-level indie-rock space that Paperhaus resides in.
Lead single "Cairo" blends a hulking beast of a riff that you've heard hundreds of times with a lead that sounds more like a panic attack than a melody to great effect, even if the act doesn't result in much more than an example of a well-done bait-and-switch. The song's almost-whispered vocals and ever-consistent drums only add to the song's already dense texture; the result is a song that recalls the best of the "classics" without feeling stale.
The woozy warble of "Misery" explains the album's "blues" Bandcamp tag and somehow manages to blend the sounds you would expect from The Black Keys or new-Arctic Monkeys with the dissonance and discomfort you might find on a Xiu Xiu record. It's an incredibly odd pairing, but somehow Paperhaus makes it feel at home on the album. The extended jam-session at the end of the almost 8-minute track drags the intrigue generated by the song's first half to a grinding halt and makes you forget about why you even really thought the song was cool to begin with.
Conversely, "Surrender" takes whatever scraps of creepout-vibes it can scrounge from the wreckage at the end of "Misery" and weaves them with post-punk apathy and dad-rock guitar heroics in the best possible way. It's one of the album's slower jams, but the vocal work is enchanting and everything is sonically engaging enough to hold attention. The constant chants of, "Surrender to the night," and vampiric howling over-theatrics are a bit much, an example of the lack of self restraint that plagues the album.
Paperhaus is a good album, but certainly one that could have used a little more time in the cutting room. All the basics of a fantastic debut are here, but the band consistently draws out ideas or indulges to the point of completely losing the momentum the initial idea held. It's a solid start from a band that's proven it’s creativity on a pair of smaller releases in years past, and I'm sure what's next will be yet another step in the right direction.
