Artist: Hotel of the Laughing Tree
Album: Terror and Everything After
Label: Brookvale Records
Release Date: Feb. 1
Grade: B
Bizarrely named, never straightforward, and surprisingly versatile, Hotel of the Laughing Tree pleasantly surprises with Terror and Everything Else.
The band's first full-length album and first release since winning "Best Music on Campus" at the 2009 mtvU Woodie Awards, Terror and Everything Else, is an album that readily escapes from the conventions of the indie-pop genre it is nominally a part of.
Though the Long Island sextet fashions itself as a fairly conventional indie band, vestiges of frontman and songwriter AJ Estrada's progressive rock background can be caught in several of the album's tracks.
Songs like "Another Harvard Renaissance," "Gunpowder Falls," and the album's title track play with syncopation and phrasing, with "Gunpowder Falls" boasting a particularly interesting 4/4 riff that's phrased as though it were alternating bars of 3/4 and 5/4. A few of the songs even change time signatures occasionally, which is a lot more than one comes to expect in the way of musical dexterity from a self-professed indie-pop band.
Even tracks that are relatively light in the way of instrumentation and arrangement surprise in other ways. The opening of "Winchester Devil Grass" has the same blues-inspired feel and bad drumming of an early White Stripes song, while "Sanctuary" contains ample saxophone and piano parts, utilizing the talents of all six of the band's members.
Despite the album's promise, there are more than a couple dud tracks. "Barnaby Bison's Blind," the opening track, boasts a somewhat catchy riff but little else, while "Forging the Family Name" and "Mont St. Michel" are shamelessly boring filler tracks, serving no purpose but to pad the album's runtime by a few minutes.
The band also has a tendency to fall back on predictably placed crescendos and ascending partial arpeggios to segue between one segment of a song and another, and it gets stale quickly.
Reservations aside, Terror and Everything After is an impressive first album from an exciting band on the rise, and it's certainly worth checking out.
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