Arbor Labor Union - I Hear You

Pitchfork 68

Arbor Labor Union likes to sing about singing. The Georgia post-punk band’s debut album, released in 2015 under the name Pinecones, was titled Sings for You Now, and it contained numerous lyrical references to the titular act; in essence, the album was an account of the band’s own creation, propelled by muscular hymns and steeped in a mystical if not downright metaphysical aura. If Sings for You Now was an origin story, I Hear You is a mission statement. Following a name change to Arbor Labor Union, the group has refined and expounded upon its throbbing, rootsy drone. They’ve also doubled down on singing about singing—if not always in the most convincing way.

Veterans of various punk and hardcore bands, the guys in Arbor Labor Union drew inspiration from Henry David Thoreau’s transcendentalist philosophy for Sings for You Now, and these two areas of inspiration still hold heavy sway over I Hear You. On the pounding “Radiant Mountain Road,” an uplifting command to “Ascend to the Mount of Joy” is fueled by nervy guitar interplay. Rather than trading or entwining leads, though, guitarists Brain Atoms and Bo Orr speak to each other in blocks of chord and texture. “Belief’d” is just as elemental, a hymn cast in circular, mutant-Southern-rock riffs and bleary distortion; at the same time, there’s an almost pagan spiritualism at play, a call to invest “in the occult whispers of shifting plates” and “the stacking of heads into a faceless totem” before adding—exclamation point theirs—“We believe in those things / Belief!”

If it sounds a bit on-the-nose, that directness is even more blatant on tracks like “Mr. Birdsong,” “Hello Transmission,” and “Volume Peaks.” Here Orr sings of being “fresh and green/And you’d always heard of song/But you would never sing”; of how “In a song I sang to you/That in a song it came to you”; and how “I live in a song/I dance when it’s played.” At points, this recursive amplification of the power of song is dizzying. Other times it comes across as forced, a clever idea filled beyond its capacity, or a conceptual exercise that flies in the face of the music’s primal howl.

That howl, though, is considerable. Ironically, it’s also restricted mostly to the instruments. Orr’s vocals have developed only slightly since Sings for You Now. His style and subject matter are so similar to that of Lungfish’s Daniel Higgs, it's impossible not to compare the two—and in that match-up, Orr can’t come close in terms of depth, dimensionality, or sheer force of will. But even disregarding that, Orr’s delivery feels far too sleepy and easygoing when pitted against the enormity of the band, or even his own lyrics; even his occasional yelps of euphoria feel restrained. He’s most compelling on “IHU,” a shimmering, meditative chant that boils over into a call to action: “We trust our leader/We heed his word/We’ve studied joy / And it can be heard.” That joy can’t always be discerned throughout I Hear You, but Arbor Labor Union have taken a respectable leap toward realizing the throbbing cosmic Americana that clearly rings in their souls.