Component #4 :: When a House Is Not a Home

“Hemmingway’s Prayer” gives me a small cardiovascular problem before I have properly understood what is happening. For a few seconds it sounds as though The Radio Dept have wandered into a minor liturgical service and decided to stay. Then I read the title. Fine. This melancholy has grass under its shoes.

The only explanatory sentence attached to When A House Is Not A Home is: “Sometimes a house is just a house.” Component#4 is Mike Rowley, whose earlier …Into Memory… drew directly on a 1990s Black Country childhood: decaying factories, vandalised bus shelters, canals, people remembered from then. This time the filing system has become much worse. 

Look at the titles. New Cross. John Hughes. Captain America. Recurring Dream. Frankie’s Song. West Park. “Yeah Yeah Yeah Wicked.” “Make A Brew.” Memory rarely preserves the important thing with dignity. It keeps a stupid phrase somebody said twenty-five years ago and loses the afternoon around it.

“John Hughes” stays close to that soft-focus dream pop: a small drum machine, veiled synths and bass carries much of the structure while the guitars have been nudged towards the perimeter. Again I hear The Radio Dept. Lo-fi here is mostly poor visibility.

“Why Don’t You Ever Write Happy Songs?” may not even be addressed to Rowley. It could be sent to the entire Wayside & Woodland catalogue. Few labels have spent so long watching what happens to a landscape after people have finished using it: old industry, canals, suburban margins, weather, scrub, paths entered from the wrong side of town.

Here Rowley needs almost nothing. An organ, essentially. Calling it only an organ would be like describing dusk by taking inventory of the remaining light.

Then “Captain America” rises into falsetto and I am abruptly thinking of Jori Sjöroos: Magenta Skycode first, then the immense music of the final This Empty Flow. An odd association, and it refuses to leave. There seems to be the faint corrective sheen of Auto-Tune on the vocal too, carefully administered. For a moment this becomes inverted pastoral: soft electronics, emptied civic space, human tenderness surviving among materials designed for entirely different purposes.

“Yeah Yeah Yeah Wicked” starts with piano and one of those melodies whose familiarity cannot be traced. I would swear I have heard it before. I would happily hear it another hundred times. It possesses the slightly embarrassing gift of knowing precisely where melancholy stops hurting and becomes pleasurable.

A subdued beat eventually finds some courage behind it. Then comes a synth with the muffled body of brass heard through heavy fabric. Nothing demands attention. The pieces seem to know that insisting would spoil something.

By “West Park” the greenery has gone. This is electronic urban pop moving with unusual discretion. The drum machine keeps travelling while fragments underneath retain a distant cellular memory of drum and bass: some velocity remains in the blood, never enough to turn the track into quotation. It crosses the summer almost unnoticed, carrying more momentum than it first lets on.

“How Can I?” puts the voice through a vocoder and somehow changes the temperature of the light. That matters because underneath it sits an unexpectedly melodic harmonic turn which, left untreated, could almost sound happy. The processing cools it slightly, leaving the song suspended somewhere between warmth and distance.

By now the second half of the album has changed shape for me. These feel less like songs arranged in sequence than small places with their own material conditions. You enter and know immediately where you are.

You just don’t know the address.

That may be why “Make A Brew” is such a good final title. After Recurring Dream, How Can I?, John Hughes, Captain America and whatever emotional paperwork the rest of the album has failed to complete, Rowley ends with a mundane instruction. The piano is solemn without becoming ceremonial, positioned just far enough away from the foreground. Ninety-three seconds. Then it stops. 

No revelation arrives to sort the previous ten tracks. Good.

Perhaps memory is doing something more accurate by remaining badly catalogued. A park, a filmmaker, Frankie, a phrase, a cup of tea. Some things acquire enormous emotional mass for reasons that become impossible to recover later. When A House Is Not A Home rarely tries to repair those missing explanations. Its pop melodies are often clearer than the memories attached to them.

I suspect this will be one of those records I keep putting on without ever quite deciding to do so. At some point I’ll probably forget why.