House Of Love* – Audience With The Mind

Listen ... no really, you should listen, it’s not about the thinking.  What most people are thinking about, is that they want another House Of Love album, just like the one that made so much sense to them the last time, one that would take them to the same places.  But man, it’s about the group and their musical progression.  It’s about the space they’re in, it’s about what they’re feeling, where if you signed up for the trip, then please don’t expect the scenery to remain the same mile after mile.

While this album is layered with just as much texture and emotion as ever, it’s just shown from a different angle, and aren’t all good hallucinations just that, perceiving things from differing angles. On Audience with the Mind the voices have been brought more to the center, the vocals are much more clear, the record feels like it’s a bit more light and airier, yet still warm and filled with dark ion.  I don’t believe that many people took the time to seriously listen to the lyrics on previous House Of Love albums, due to the nature of the music being so rich, so full, so heavily layered and textured that the vocals were just an extension, an afterthought of that intoxicating hypnotic sound.  While here, the vocals need to be reckoned with, they’re not hiding in the background mysteriously.  Here we almost get a combination for the feel of House Of Love (The Butterfly Album) and the feeling of Guy Chadwick’s brilliant, entirely romantic, solo effort Lazy Soft and Slow.

Even with all of that, this is still very much a House Of Love album in every respect, and while acceptance of this release may be difficult, there will come a time when the place Audience with the Mind holds in you collection will be as strong as any other of their releases, it’s just gonna take you some time to shake off the hallucinations that wasted you on previous outings, stepping you into the afterglow, not quite reality, yet not wholly as intoxicatingly dream-laden.

As always, the instrumentations are resounding and clean, precise and flawless in their application and production.  Every member of the band is playing as a single unit, flowing together with an assuredness, where each aspect or vision is no more important that any other.  There is comfortable and wonderfully sustained guitar work, over which has been laid very controlled and perhaps a more prominent use of the drums; though that may be debatable.  For sure, the record is slightly more rock and roll then other House of Love releases, yet methinks that’s a reflection of the emancipation one begins to sense as the acid wears off, the feeling of grounded-ness and control steps in, and one is left smiling at the chair, the carpet and the posters on the wall that were all so much more animated the night before, and yes, the ceiling is now back in place.  With the sound on this release remaining moody dark warm and low, we’re still presented with an adventure of colour, like that of a summer's slow motion sunset.

This record will hold it’s own that’s for sure. You’re going to find bits of past House Of Love visions lingering around the edges, nevertheless, I’m ever so happy to hear the band step front and center with a new refined and ambitious recording.

Review by Jenell Kesler