The Hackles
What a beautiful thing I have made
Jealous Butcher
2023
For their third album, the Astoria, Oregon duo The Hackles have become a trio, Luke Ydstie and Kati Claborn being joined by new neighbour Halli Anderson from River Whyless and Horse Feathers on a full-time basis, adding both a third voice and fiddle to the mix while, as with their previous album, while more restricted on account of lockdowns, also featuring drums by Dan Hunt, Cooper Trail and Olaf Ydtsie along with assorted horns from Bart Budwig, Justin Ringle and Dave Jorgensen.
With Kati on lead, it opens on banjo notes with the slow walking Damn The Word, which reflects her recurring nightmare about being misunderstood and mistrusting your thoughts and words, here manifested in how things unspoken can leave you “Just waiting to die like a Christmas tree”.
Written and sung by Luke and stemming from having built an interconnected series of tree forts and platforms in the garden for their daughter, Hum with The Worms is a meditation on the inevitability of decomposition and, by association, a comment on unthinking destruction of the environment (“hacking the root to pull a stone…how can I see you when you’re gone”) and the need to tune in to connections with the natural world and “hum with the worms till I learn the words”.
Bluesily picked and softly sung with keys and Kati’s clarinet, James’ Drink is a memory of, and tribute to, the Voodoo Room, a now-defunct venue and home of the local Astoria music community while more focused on guitar; Angela is a Desdemona Sands cover, a side project that Kati and Halli have with another neighbour, Gabrielle Macrae, a song about small moments with big consequences and reformulating the stories we tell ourselves that revolves around the narrator finding and opening an old still-sealed letter from her father with the words “Angela, oh, Angela, I’m leaving”.
Halli steps into the spotlight with the banjo-driven bluegrassy Birdcage, a song inspired by an article she read in the local paper the day she moved in about a teenager who’d shot and gutted a deer within the city limits, serving here as a commentary on toxic masculinity (“Your smile was shining like a dime in the Indiana moonlight/Kicking shotgun shells in a ring around the fire…One eye is black as oil, both eyes are blue/Faithful to the back of an almighty hand/What a model man/We learn from whom we can”).
Written and sung by Luke, and again featuring clarinet, musically echoing the sound of classic Laurel Canyon, Pictures Of Elvis takes its cue from photos of both him and Nixon (“the boys”) in an Astoria cafe employee restroom and its impetus from a particularly heavy period of rain that prompted concerns about the waters rising, the song about those who could do something but just stand by and “pretend that it’s going to get better before the end”.
There’s a thematic connection of sorts to Halli’s Water for Your Bedside in that it too looks at self-inflicted meltdown (“Why slam the door at a face you know so well/That it finds you in your dreams?/Don’t go to town like it’s the last thing that you’ll have/With a stranger in your sheets”).
The title track heads into existential territory with a fictional story of a farmer and a travelling musician who engage in a discussion about life and our individual, lasting or temporary impacts, persuading themselves they made all the right decisions after all, the song returning to the idea of decomposition and about not getting hung up on the futility of what you do, given its inevitable impermanence (“No I’ve not seen a thing you left here in the spring/Maybe they’re just like you, found a crack slipped right through”) and celebrating doing what you love (“It’s the least we can do, the humblest of fights/Find a reason and cling to it tight/Anything that lets you sleep through the night”) rather than living with regret.
Another of Kati’s, the dreamy shuffle of Steve, was sparked by the line “It makes no sense at all, and if it does, I don’t like it” in one of Terry Pratchett’s books, repurposed as a commentary on what people in positions of power are capable of as they’re blindly stumbling through (“I’d do the right thing if I knew what that was/Threw all my good intentions under the bus/Making mistakes for the all of us”) and looking to save face.
I’m not sure, knowing that the word ‘shimmies’ refers to a local colloquialism for a pair of pink pyjama bottoms Luke once had isn’t too much information, but featuring a steady drum beat, piano and horns, Alligators shifts the musical palette for a more experimental feel, the song inspired by the book No Fighting, No Biting and the experience of pandemic home schooling (“kids don’t you turn into alligators/don’t you go fighting and biting now/ please running around the house in a circle/screaming the pigeons out of the trees”) and feeling “in the seaweed up to my knees”.
It ends with one last hurrah from Kati, the fingerpicked, clarinet-haunted First Time For Everything, the most country number on the album, written and recorded in the wake of her father’s passing and poignantly about trying to come to terms with change, loss and making the best you can of things (“Picking chicken off the bone & acting like it’s a meal/Trading soundbites for my soul & I’m thinking I got a deal”) when “It’s hard to hit the eight ball when they keep moving the cue”. It seems pointless to scrabble around for a succinct soundbite summation when the album title says it all.
Watch them performing Birdcage live:
Order the album via Bandcamp: https://thehackles.bandcamp.com/album/what-a-beautiful-thing-i-have-made