Phosphorescent - Pride

It was cold outside when I first heard Matthew Houck sing. I was in an enormous wooden house with about a dozen other young adults, most of them talented musicians, the rest of us avid listeners. Though we were there ostensibly for the purpose of hanging out while those of us in a folk band rehearsed for a show, the natural proclivity of teenagers to drink and smoke and laugh and argue and carouse had rather derailed the rehearsal plan. Amid djembe drumming and banjo noodling, a particularly emaciated guitarist withdrew from an enormous binder one CD. “Hey y’all cut that out and listen to this.” The album was Pride, the (then) recently released LP by freak-folk/country artist Matthew Houck, who has released his last three LP’s under the moniker Phosphorescent. Houck released a Willie Nelson tribute album entitled To Willie just this month, but Pride remains the most recent original work, so I figured I’d best review that instead.

Pride is an extremely cohesive album, in keeping with Houck’s previous work. The album feels like it was cut inside of a small, cozy house well outside of Atlanta, in early mornings and late evenings, through the bleary glory of a hungover sunrise, the gentle haze of good bourbon. The reason for this is evident; that’s how it happened. Houck plays every instrument on the album, and his familiarity shows, but he’s not the only musician who recorded on the album, preferring to recruit a friend here or there. Despite this, Pride is the kind of album with a mood and tone so precise and unique that it could only have come from one artist.

Pride, like almost all of Houck’s work, has been incredibly well received critically, but enjoys less commercial success. But Phosphorescent is the real deal; Houck puts every ounce of himself into this music, and it shows. Thousands of sounds, not a one out of place. If you’re a fan of folk looking for something a little different, or if you’re an Animal Collective returning to folk roots, Phosphorescent is a phenomenal choice, and Pride specifically is certainly worth the buy if you can find it.

Lo-fi, organic, and melancholy to the point of occasional sorrow, Pride takes traditional folk, blues, and ballad structure, combines it with Houck’s simple, compelling songwriting, and then either pursues it classically, or turns it on its head entirely. However, even the tracks in which Houck adheres to traditional form, such as the ballad “my dove, my dove, my lamb,” are composed in an extremely deliberate and complex way, the acoustic and slide guitars sliding over and under a harmonica and an incredibly unobtrusive accordion, punctuated by some sort of maraca of shaker. Coupled with a soft, celestial human choir and the desperate understatement of Houck’s singing, the track is drenched with the same sublime effect the rest of the album can proudly claim.

But not every track is traditionalist. “At death, a proclamation” is simultaneously dark and triumphant, haunting and rousing; short, but perhaps the strongest track on the album. Houck managed this by grounding and driving the song, otherwise an ethereal near-psychedelic musing on death, by recording it over a chance on-site recording of a high school drumline, turning the track into a brief but brilliant anthem with an aggression and a spirit to it that is unmatched by any other track.

Striking a balance between the two is “A Picture of Our Torn-Up Praise,” the album’s opener, and the most upbeat track on the album, which isn’t saying much, considering that despite that fact, the tone it manages to strike resides somewhere between the realms of wistful, hopeful, and whimsical. Houck’s voice is such an instrument in and of itself that his lyrics are at some points obfuscated by his musicality. It’s a common problem on the album, but an entirely forgivable one, because the lyrics, while poetic (I won't be the one when all is said and all is done/ I won't be breathing like you breathe into the light of day/ I'll be in the yard still taking pictures in the dark/ of all our torn up praise), aren’t what’s really important here. The essence of this song, and of the album, lies in the sound, in a way exemplified by the final track, the title track, “Pride”.

“Pride” is an instrumental track that can actually be seen as the outro of the penultimate track, a soft ballad with hard lyrics called “cocaine lights”, if an outro is what you would call a six minute aural soundscape. It carries the basic melody over from the previous track in the form of Houck’s voice layered dozens and dozens of times, each instance meandering in its own slightly different direction, permutating and evolving as the song progresses. The first time I heard it in that big wooden house, and every time since, the track paints a vivid picture of a savanna at night. Maracas hiss like rattlesnakes, and yelps like dogs or jackals sound in the distance, as Houck’s voice shimmers above it all like an aurora borealis, phosphorescent.



"A Picture Of Our Torn-Up Praise"



"at death, a proclamation"


"Wolves"