The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
Every Tuesday, the Sounding Board is a space for a short-ish review of a recent-ish release and conversations about new-to-you music. We’ll get things started with a write-up about a newer, likely under-heard album, and invite you to share your music musings in the comments.
On certain stressful, over-caffeinated days, I can feel my pulse in my glasses. It’s a fluttering throb of tension at my temples that registers as external stimulus but is all internal pressure.
It’s the same spot tickled by the noise blasts and spasmodic rhythms of Soft Rains Will Come. The new album is the second collaboration between noise mavens G.W. Sok and Ignacio Córdoba, who expanded the project’s sound and roster for this eight-song batch of twitchy, pulsing goodness.1 On their second team-up, This House’s core duo is joined by Søren Høi on drums and Kristian Tangvik on synthesizer.2 The additional personnel adds bombast, complexity and depth to Soft Rains Will Come, resulting in an album of noisy wheels within wheels that spin in independent yet complementary directions. Those disparate propulsive forces push the album through an assortment of prickly genre neighborhoods, including ambient noise, noise rock, math rock and industrial rock.
That makes for an angular, jittery listen. Discordant electronic hums and glitchy crackles, wilting guitar chords, urgent drums and the flat, authoritative honk of Sok’s voice create a humid, insular and compellingly charged atmosphere.3 Aside from the LP’s title track, which finds a sing-song melody after a couple of twitchy minutes, obvious hooks and approachable instrumentation are in fairly short supply.
Soft Rains Will Come might be the least cuddly album to feature a song with “Butterfly” in its title.4 Still, This House offers a few pieces of ear candy for folks who might ordinarily bounce off this sort of album, a work that wraps up with “Shoelaces.” That track is a couple of minutes of lyrics steeped in dismal sentiment, capped by roughly four minutes of gradually fading semi-structured noise.
The fleeting glimpses of a more straightforward rock band often intermingle with Soft Rains Will Come’s most oblique or strident moments. Few things are more immediate than a thunderous drum fill like the kind Høi calls up to give the sloshing sounds that wind down “Shoelace” some sense of shape. The power chords that follow the jagged metal-on-metal screeching sounds on “Burned House” form the sort of big, bright lick that could slot into a Rage Against the Machine song, and are another example of This House’s penchant for putting a light at the end of a self-imposed tunnel. The dark passageway itself is rewarding, too.
Soft Rains Will Come has a lot to offer fans of weird noise and intense feelings. Dental drills, construction equipment, Mark Sandman’s oddball jerry-rigged bass and “Atrocity Exhibition” — both the Danny Brown album and Joy Division song — all come to mind while listening to the album. It’s nice that there are flecks of brightness mixed into the brutalist concrete, but the sturdy abrasion is functional and admirable on its own. That, combined with a sharklike commitment to constant motion throughout the album, makes This House hard to leave.
About the writer
Ben Hohenstatt
Ben Hohenstatt is an Alaska-based dog owner who moonlights as a music writer and photographer.
For more information, consult your local library or with parental permission visit his website.
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The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
The Sounding Board
A weekly column where New Music Tuesdays live on. Conversation is encouraged in the comments.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
The Kids In The Hall, Season Five, Episode Ten
“We just have to clean the whole town again, that’s all.”
“Get us a drink, you anti-Semetic bastard!”
“You’re a producer now! You don’t get us drinks, we get you drinks.”
“Come see the noisy kid who hasn’t shut up since birth!”
“Now let’s clear this up. This is Dave Foley and this is an elk.”
“Then I thought ‘wow, what a hot hump.’.”
“Yes, I said hunchbacks, we’re reclaiming the word.”
“My dad was a drunk who slept around a lot, maybe that’s why I’m attracted to you.”
“Would you still love me if I were a man?”
“Would you still have a vagina?”
Thinking of the contrast between this show’s language and that of Tim Robinson – this is precise to the point of absurdity, and Robinson is imprecise to the point of etc.
‘Soaking competition’ means something very different today.
Inside No. 9, “CTRL/ALT/ESC”
This is how it’s punctuated on the in-episode title card, anyway: Wikipedia has it with commas. These things are sent to try us.
A fun episode. It’s clear enough early on, thanks to some deliberately jarring emotional bits–no one normally sits her husband down in a serial killer-themed escape room to sincerely talk about how she’s always loved him–that All Is Not as It Seems, and the escape room becomes an interesting and inherently tense metaphor for a very different kind of escape from trapped helplessness. (I like that there’s some wiggle room here for how you interpret the doctor figure: my wife went one way on it, and I went another.) Like a lot of episodes, this excels at a kind of right-in-front-of-you sleight of narrative hand, where it’s clear there’s more going on, but I don’t care to try to figure it out in advance because I would also just happily watch this loving (with some underlying tensions) family try to solve an escape room. Good total overhauls need to have the real tale and the surface tale interlock in interesting ways, and in general, I think people think of that, but “make sure the surface tale is also gripping in its own right” is too often neglected, and right from the first episode, this show has not had that problem. Very sorry to only have two episodes + a behind-the-scenes documentary left.
The Practice, “Capitol Crimes” – More soap with Bobby, who keeps insisting he is still being faithful but is having dinner with an old girlfriend who just came back to Boston (Teri Polo). It’s reasonably well done, but Bobby is increasingly unsympathetic (which maybe played into ABC’s hands when it said to fire Dylan McDermott from his own show). But the actual meat here is far more interesting. A drug dealer, intending to kill another dealer he thinks is gunning for him, kills a single mother of three. And the Dept. of Justice, wanting to make an example of murderer in a state without the death penalty, swoops in and announces that he will be tried at the federal level and face death. It turns out that a panel of five randomly chosen DoJ lawyers makes the decision as to whether to ask for the death penalty before any sort of trial, and that the panel is under no obligation to allow defense lawyers to say anything. Clearly this is David E. Kelley once again opposing the death penalty and also opposing the heavy handed law and order approach of John Ashcroft (we even get a clip of him defending the public’s love of the death sentence). Nothing is subtle here, but nothing should be. Sam Jones III is far more effective and even relaxed as the drug dealer than he ever was on Smallville. (Ironically, Jones was convicted of drug dealer some years later.)
Frasier, “The Harassed” – Wow, it was my night for future convicted felons, since this episode marks the arrival of Felicity Huffman (arrested in that weird “rich people fixing it so their kids could get another leg up” case) as Fraiser’s next love interest. Who is a bottom feeding self-proclaimed financial expert now stuck doing a radio show. And is utterly unlikeable, on purpose. I had totally forgotten she was around for a while, as if I was deluding myself the show had only bright spots its last two years. Anyway, she’s not the love interest yet, and when Frasier comes onto her (deliberating echoing “are you as turned I as I am?” from season one of Cheers), the staff is required to do sexual harassment training. Which is depicted as a total farce that no one takes seriously (with several men acting like the sort of sexist asshat such training is supposed to stop) and with a totally useless trainer (Mike Judge, who weirdly looks like that other animated TV dad, Dan Castellaneta). I get that sexual harassment training is often more about covering corporate butts than actually training people, but the refusal to take harassment as a problem was really unfunny.
MASH, “The Abduction of Margaret Houlihan” – When Margaret goes to help a pregnant local and only tells Klinger (who was on night watch and sleeps through the story), everyone else thinks she’s been kidnapped. For some reason, Colonel Flagg shows up to investigate in his usual style. Doesn’t make a ton of sense, but anything with Flagg is going to be funny. And we are building on Margaret’s steady development.
Roofman – a charming entry into the “what if an unusual guy did a strange thing” true-story genre, with good performances from an impressive cast. I’m not sure there’s quite enough there to make this memorable but it was enjoyable in the moment, and I really enjoyed Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst’s chemistry. Less keen on the score, which is a sort of quirky Randy Newman-esque thing that seemed like an odd fit, the film is better when it’s interrogating the balance between Roofman’s charm and the dangerous aspects of his personality.
Seinfeld, S7 – “The Pool Guy”. With Noah Baumbach regular Carlos Jacott as the titular Guy! Another episode that has plenty of laughs that don’t all quite hang together into anything more than a solid episode. George getting upset that other people want to be friends with Susan is pretty great, and I enjoyed Kramer’s accidental new career informing people about movie times (his new phone number? 555-FILK, amusingly).
Honey don’t. . The Coen bros. doing solo projects after working together forever is very funny, because you can see clearly how The Night of the Hunter is both of their favorite movies but Joel loves surrealism and expressionism and Ethan loves murder, camp, and it being a hard world for small things.
So you got Margaret Qualley playing Katherine Hepburn playing Phillip Marlowe as a PI whose client dies before hiring her. You got Chris Evans doing sexually Robert Mitchum as sexually liberated Harry Powell, but sleazier. Charlie Day is one of the comic relief cops. You got a very stylish French lady acting as the enforcer for the French mafia. (“they are very… secular” killed me.) Aubrey Plaza is Burt Lancaster maybe? (Also I’m gonna be gross for a second. Hot damn.) The plot is a very shaggy whodunit that takes a detour from the main plot (or does it????) . It’s a tough world for victims. “Nihilist” and “misanthrope” get thrown around a lot, both at and by the Coens, but the beating heart of the whole filmography, even this solo project, is that it’s a hard world
for small things and you gotta find a way to abide.
The conclusion did feel like there was some foreshadowing missing. And the denouement was ambiguous to me if it really happened or not.
“tell the french it’s god’s plan”
“the french are not going to like that. They are very…[zoom
in] [slowly] [more dead pan than you can possibly believe] secular.”
“how about we meet up socially?”
“I told you. I like girls.”
“you always say that!”
This one is great as it repeats and it moves from Charlie maybe sexually harassing Qualley to being oblivious to being a fun little inside joke they have.
“and her dad?”
“well, those are fifteen year old
ashes. But if she says she did it, I believe her. She was an honest cop.”
Ok, and I did earlier pick Joel as the cinematography bro and Ethan as the screwball camp murder bro, but the composition of the shots through the tea kettle was a nice bit of camera work, even if it’s more blocking I guess than composition per se.
The conclusion feels like there was a scene cut earlier. We see a family photo in the weird church robes and then the yearbook
quote but I don’t think we got anything linking her to the Four-Way church earlier.
The grandpa scenes are an amazingly clever bit of misdirection and also heart breaking. Even if the movie is too shaggy to put in the top tier of his work with his brother, this is a virtuosic bit of writing and direction
What did we listen to?
As I expected, once I started the Blank Check about Picnic at Hanging Rock, I did not want to hear hours of effusive praise for a movie I did not like. I instead rewound the clock to the episode about Paprika, which is allowing me to appreciate the movie more, but also reminding me that ultimately movies about or emulating dreams aren’t my thing.
The Laser Age combined the low key style of Keith Phipps with the high energy of Jordan Hoffman and was the better for it. I think Hoffman probably eats oatmeal high energy.
After listening to the one and only album by my filker friend Daniel “Gundo” Gunderson – a pretty okay combination of original stuff and covers – the algorithm decided I needed to listen to The New Basement Tapes. And this time, the computer was right. And now I need to track down Rhiannon Giddens’s solo stuff.
60 Songs that Explain the ’90s: The 2000s
Even though I really like this podcast and generally find Rob Harvilla to be exceptionally thoughtful and insightful when discussing pop music, I’d built up a backlog. This week I knocked out episodes on “Toxic’ by Brittney Spears and “Milkshake” by Kelis. Both offered interesting context for songs I’d never thought especially hard about.
X-Ray Spex
The Kelis episode of 60 Songs included a lot of discussion of other iconoclastic Black female artists, including Poly Styrene. That prompted me to revise both Germfree Adolescents and Conscious Consumer. Both albums remain excellent.
Hell yeah X-Ray Spex! Should give Conscious Consumer a whirl. That sax sound is still so unique compared to other British punk.
Started Cool Stuff for Cool People’s episode on Russian anarchists and sent it to my dad so he understands my chaotic good leanings/gets out of his depression a bit. The Lodge Tales podcast continues to be pretty cool too.
Music: The Music Man, what a perfect old-school musical, arguably THE old-school, pre-Sondheim musical. The original Broadway recording is obviously best; Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster’s voices on the 2022 recording are too thin gruel in comparison, Preston is not a booming singer but he fills the room far better and does patter marvelously. (My actual preference for charming, duplicitous Jackman is the excellent Bad Education.) If I have any beef with this musical, it’s that Wilson, so nostalgic for his Iowa childhood, may not have seen where some of the closed-minded nature of the Midwest might be read as unbearably white or racist. When I was listening to “Trouble,” I wondered if he knew why River City parents might be extra concerned about ragtime and jazz.
A Little Night Music, specifically the 1995 recording my grandfather had. “Soon” with three different counterpoints is some peak Sondheim.
Iceage, one of my favorite bands, has their first song in five years and it’s very good! “Star” sounds back to basics in a good way but still in that post-punk/Britpop vein.
Nick Cave/Bad Seeds report: Yeah these albums largely fuck. There are the odd numbers that don’t work but the whole of these are very good to great. They lose me a little with The Good Son which is very much a “I got out of rehab” album except the sublime “Ship Song.” I suspect the Let Love In/Murder Ballads/Boatman’s Call period is the peak with the least dead spots per album, with Murder Ballads being bulletproof. “John Finn’s Wife” is also one of my favorite recent songs, sexy and menacing and so fucking COOL.
Finally getting back to the 1001 Albums, although work has prevented too much progress so far.
Echo and the Bunnymen – Ocean Rain: I think I slightly preferred the previous EATB album on the list, although a couple of their best songs are here. I don’t think they’re a band I could ever fully love but I can see that they had something.
Minutemen – Double Nickels on the Dime: got to admire the amusing idea of a band known for sub-2-minute songs doing a double album, but there’s SO much goofing around and straight-up filler here. I’ve liked what I’ve heard by this band before and there’s probably a really strong single album here but sitting through the whole thing did not exactly make me a fan.
Lloyd Cole and the Commotions – Rattlesnakes: pretty great, I’ve never really given Lloyd much of a chance but it turns up this is way up my street. Very much in keeping with the other great jangly bands of the 80s (Orange Juice, Aztec Camera etc) and thoroughly enjoyable throughout, I’ve already been back for a second listen to this one.
Youssou N’Dour et le Super Étoile de Dakar – Immigrés: I only knew Youssou N’Dour for his later hit 7 Seconds, accompanied by Neneh Cherry. That’s a decent moody pop song but this is the music he was making before a larger world audience caught on and it’s joyous and exciting. Very enjoyable indeed!
Not much podcasting this week, just the Critical Darlings Oscar recap. It’s been fun spending a bit of time with these guys but I’m not sure I’m invested enough to carry on now that they’re moving off the Blank Check feed and onto their own.
Well, let’s see if I can finish this comment before my browser resets the page again!
I don’t have anything especially specific, just the usual run of new singles I’ve been hearing. A surprising amount of which are from long-standing acts. Who knew I’d get put on to new Kim Gordon, Modest Mouse, and Death Cab in a 12-hour period in 2026?
My buddy here got two tickets to the Belair Lip Bombs show a week from today, so I’m gonna go to that with him.
“Riptides” is very good.
Some interesting literary references here. “There Will Come Soft Rains” is the title of a Ray Bradbury post-apocalypse story (really gets to students when I teach it); “Burned House” references the story’s downer ending.
The Atrocity Exhibition is the title of a J.G Ballard novel, with provocative chapters, such as, “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race”