Review: Lord Huron, Austin Scheerer

It’s not often you come across an artist that somehow manages to change their sound so significantly across only a few albums while sounding virtually unchanged. Yet somehow, LA based four-piece Lord Huron have managed to do it. They started their musical career in 2010 as a solo project by frontman, singer, and lyricist, Ben Schneider, who began adding members until he had a full band at his back. Their debut album, Lonesome Dreams, was released in 2012, followed by Strange Trails in 2015, and Vide Noir (French for ‘black void’) in 2018. Multiple songs of theirs have been featured in films and TV shows, such as A Walk in the Woods, Grey’s Anatomy, Vampire Diaries, 13 Reasons Why, and Community, to name a few. While genre classification can be incredibly subjective, I think it’s safe to say that Lord Huron can be considered an indie-alternative band. Within that category, however, they’ve experienced a change from indie folk to something more at home in the category of garage rock.

Their first album, Lonesome Dreams has a romantic and almost playful tone to it while being wholly serious in its themes. It’s a very loose concept album, following the eponymous Lord Huron in his first encounter with soon-to-be-friend Admiral Blaquefut while he searches for his lost love, Helen. The album was inspired by author George Ranger Johnson, who penned a series of 10 western novels between the 60s and 80s. Ever heard of him? If you answered ‘no’ that’s completely understandable, the-not-very-well-known author’s books are the type of thing that you’d be able to find in any given thrift store. If you answered ‘yes’ then I have some bad news: he’s a completely fictional person and only ever existed to give Lonesome Dreams context and inspiration. The really interesting thing about LD is that not only is it a story about these three characters, but frontman Schneider actually created his own little world about which he writes his music. Obviously, a concept album is usually built on fiction in order to tell a story, but rarely does the lore go deeper than the general story told through the songs. This is not the case for Lord Huron. There’s no overarching storyline to the album, but each song is from a specific character’s perspective and tells a small tale in the way they interact. All this culminates into an ethereal and extremely atmospheric pulp fiction (the genre, not the film) sounding album. Even the album cover gives off the same impression: a painting of a lone cowboy riding across sand dunes at night. Pretty fitting, I think. Strange Trails, their second LP, is also a loose

concept album, however one that’s darker sonically, lyrically and narratively. Schneider said in a 2015 interview with Grammy Pro: “I guess Strange Trails is kind of about not being afraid to confront sort of the dark side of life, and I think it’s healthy now and then to kinda stare into that void and just kind of be honest with your life.” This mentality is clear in the tone of the album, taking the late afternoon or warm and playful evening vibe of Lonesome Dreams, with its sounds of the wind and chimes and adding some harp, tambourine, and other instruments that give the album its mysterious and otherworldly atmosphere. Im agine a silent and heavily wooded Pacific Northwest coastline at the golden hour through to dusk; a little spooky and haunting, but beautiful at the same time. I first found Lord Huron in 2015 through one of the singles, ‘Fool for Love’, closely followed by ‘The Night We Met’, their perhaps most famous song to date. After that it was a few songs here and there, namely ‘Time to Run’ and ‘Meet Me in the Woods’. It was at this point that I thought that, while a great songwriter, Schneider kind of only wrote, like, three songs. Fine with me, since the songs included, first, a melody I really liked and, second, a lot of artists have “tells” or motifs in their music that they subconsciously use a lot. It just happens. Having listened to the band for a while, I came to realize that it was so much more than that, especially when looking to Vide Noir, an album that is straight up weird. And I mean that in the best possible way. Similarly to Strange Trails, Vide Noir has recurring melodic motifs but, beyond that it’s pretty different from both previous works. Schneider claims that the overall sound of the album was influenced by his nocturnal drives around Los Angeles and all the neon signs throughout the city. If the first two albums were sonically situated in the afternoon through the evening, Vide Noir is the dead of night. Instead of the desert or forests, we’ve travelled to cities, space and the cosmos beyond. On top of that is the introduction of electronic elements into the music as synthesizers feature heavily on the album. This change in instrumental arrangement creates a bizarre atmosphere, at times bordering on an out of body experience. The biggest culprit, so to speak, is the popular ‘Wait by the River’. It’s a surprisingly empty sounding arrangement when compared to the rest of the band’s catalogue. Its lethargic waltz rhythm would put it perfectly at home as the soundtrack to a film scene where a character is walking through LA in an altered state. The final track on the album, ‘Emerald Star,’ shares a similar tone, but leaves the album on an extremely melancholic note. I personally find that it sounds like the ‘main character’ of the album has given up and is simply drifting off into the great unknown, an image mirrored by the lyrics. It’s a beautifully sad way to end a record. The great thing about this album is that it is a very different sonic direction for the band, but it’s not quite in the realm of experimental, making it accessible for newcomers in digesting the music. Overall, Lord Huron’s music over the past decade is still very Lord Huron sounding, just modified here and there. One of 16

the most intriguing aspects of the band is Schneider’s ability to write melodies that can only be described as narrative, in the sense that they act as motifs or ‘themes,’ much like you would hear in a film score. The band has been quiet since the release of Vide Noir, but a single show has been announced for this summer at the famous Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado. And like many fans, I hope they use that show to announce more material in the near future but until then, I’m happy to wait and relive the timeless journey they’ve currently created.