Hovvdy - Taster

Pitchfork 73

Hovvdy never really seem in a hurry to go anywhere fast. Since 2014, the Austin duo of Will Taylor and Charlie Martin has made frill-free rock music on a shoestring budget—they’ve shouted out both the convenience and happily strange compression that comes from recording songs in their iPhone voice memos—that centered on repetition and spacey simplicity. They make quiet compositions that plumb the cavernous depths of romantic and existential disillusionment with little more than some fuzzy guitar strums as accompaniment, but to hear them tell it, that started out of necessity rather than design.

Both Taylor and Martin were drummers before Hovvdy, and neither has been playing guitar all that long, which they’ve said has made their instrumentals naturally “minimal.” But after an EP and a split with the similarly minded Austin band Loafer, they’ve figured out how to make those limitations work to their advantage. Their debut album Taster—released last year on tape, but reissued in remastered form by beloved Brooklyn indie rock label Double Double Whammy—rarely accelerates past a snail’s pace, but the interlocking pieces are deceptively complex. Recalling the unpretentious efforts of bands like Bedhead, Duster, and even Yo La Tengo’s more hushed moments, they stack simple riffs in idiosyncratic ways, and in the process put together 11 songs that are far more compelling than the sum of their parts.

That’s perhaps most evident on “Can’t Wait,” one of the record’s more straightforwardly catchy moments, which weaves together at least three loosely interlocking guitar riffs over the course of its three minutes. Played by a different band, it’d feel like a rip of Weezer’s across-the-sea balladry, but Hovvdy’s take is a little more austere. A lazily drawled acoustic guitar and a barely on-beat lead make the scuzzy main riff feel a little dizzier than it would otherwise. Piling uncomplicated parts on one another until it resembles something like a pop song is a surprisingly sophisticated trick—and one they’re able to keenly repeat throughout Taster. Each song seems like it should topple over under its own weight, but it never does.

Lyrically, the record revels in the overwhelming confusion and regret bound up in interpersonal relations. “In My Head” tells a surreal tale of romantic pining, describing scenes in small jagged snippets, like a conversation that takes place “on the gulf in that screened-in room.” On “Try Hard,” they perform a clever autopsy of the failures of a past relationship (“You could not call your dad back then/Forgot his name again/I never did try hard”). It’s relatively standard stuff for this sort of downcast rock music, but the beauty is in its lack of resolution. All conflicts remain unsolved—there are only events, no answers.

Taylor and Martin have jokingly referred to their music as “pillow core” over the years, which is fitting for Taster both in its downy sonics and fragmented lyricism. As they flit through various half memories and upsetting realizations, it feels like the thoughts that spin through your head as you lie in bed late at night, waiting for sleep to overtake you. Those liminal moments can be puzzling, filled with internal conflicts that are hard to untangle. But there’s a suggestion of how to move forward embedded in Taster: start at the beginning, go slow.