Retro Music Exclusive: Hounds, Midnight (LP)
Midnight is an electronic music album available only at Retro. It features Incredibox beats and mods, Substack embedding, and mixes and curations by Seth Abramson. It is the third album from Hounds.
Midnight Liner Notes
I’ve always been at once drawn to and horrified by concept albums whose conceit is that the album tells a story. Sometimes it feels like the story has been crowbarred into the songs (as with Fairfield Parlour’s still incredible White Faced Lady); sometimes there are albums in which the story feels wholly immaterial (as with the British band Nirvana’s 1967 classic, The Story of Simon Simopath); and of course there are concept albums on which the listener has to do all the work but for some reason or another it’s all right (as with one of my favorite albums as a child, Modest Mussorgsky’s classical-music Pictures at an Exhibition). I think the simple truth is that, whatever concept an album might aim to embody, the songs must work either individually as songs or as a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Liner notes have never saved an album.
{Side note: My first book of poetry, The Suburban Ecstasies, was actually a long book-in-verse, which—in the way it was conceived—is the poetry equivalent of a concept album that tells a story. Each poem could be read in isolation, or they could all be read together as a narrative.}
The story of Midnight is a simple enough one: late one night, our city-dwelling silent protagonist, like many mid-twenty-somethings in these hard times lost in his own life, meets up with a rambunctious childhood friend at a NYC corner grocery (“Bodega”). The two go to a party nearby (“Afterparty”) where they encounter a third childhood friend, a smalltime pot dealer who gives them Molly (“Dealer”). Our protagonist soon finds himself alone in his apartment experiencing a particularly vivid psychedelic trip (“Insomnia”); he imagines himself as little more than a robot with human appearance (“Android”). Troubled, he leaves his apartment and goes out into the city, which now seems more sinister and machine-like than before (“City”). He suddenly decides to do something he’s never done and hops on a freight train, which departs for points north (“Train”) and soon passes mile after mile of sleepy upstate farmland full of sleeping farmers and farm animals (“Tumbleweed”) and, later, a stretch of track filled with the sounds of crashing lakeside waves and boundless water (“Waves”). In “Migration”, the album closer, the protagonist, whose name is revealed as Lucas, hears a hallucinatory call that includes his nickname (“Luke”) and makes the decision to leave America for a new continent—specifically, a migration from the “New World” to the “Old Word,” as the call he hears contains both elements of the beginning of his story (“Bodega”) and a reprise and adaptation of “Berlin” from Transpecific.
The album’s story ends in mid-stride because, well, all stories finally do.
Midnight sits halfway between the soundscapes of Transpecific and the songs of Fliers, inasmuch as some of its tracks create moods atop which a narrative might sit more than songs with their own perspective and voice. It’s an LP, therefore, that likely does more to establish an atmosphere than put forward discrete tunes.
Still, my hope is that there are small ways in which the songs here speak to and about one another—“Insomnia” presages “Android” with clockwork and electronic sounds; train sounds are still heard on “Tumbleweed” and “Waves,” as Lucas remains aboard a train; as noted, “Migration” ties Midnight back to the first Hounds LP—but I do realize that with any album one has to develop some appreciation for individual tracks qua tracks, howsoever they may be in (attempted) conversation. The focus for me as an amateur mixer was taking some time to see how such a conversation might be written.
Prologue I: Hounds, Transpecific (2023)
If you haven’t yet listened to the first Hounds LP, you can do so here. The album cover is below.
Prologue II: Hounds, Fliers (2023)
If you haven’t yet listened to the second Hounds LP, you can do so here. The album cover for Fliers is below.
Midnight Track Listing
