Last night in Tennessee I poured myself a gin and tonic and went
outside on a porch and listened to the new Quiet Ones album. I strongly
advise you to do the same. I don’t know what you were planning to do
tonight. Maybe you were going to study for your ornithology exam or
argue with your ex-wife or eat a tuna salad and go to bed early. But I
don’t think you should do any of those things. I think you should
listen to this album instead.
Tennessee, by the way, is a good place to listen to this album. So is
Montana. So are Washington, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Rhode Island.
Really any place is a good place to listen to this album, but those
places are especially fitting because those are the places where the
album was created. It was formed in the bedrooms of three brothers –
John, Chris and David Totten – and their friends Mason Neely and Ryan
Dixon. It was created while the band members were living in different
states, playing different gigs, trying out different sounds, listening
to different crickets. Tennessee crickets, as you know, sound very
different from Rhode Island crickets. You can hear both kinds of
crickets on this album.
But mostly what you can hear on this album is all that space: all those
miles between Lookout Mountain and Missoula, between Seattle and State
College. You can hear it in the distant choirs haunting the edges of
these songs. You can hear it when Neely’s production fades a guitar
rhythm into a lonely digital heartbeat. You can hear it in the
stillness between the three chords that make up each track. You can
hear it when John sings that he wishes you were here and that he was
there. Because this is an album about being here and wanting there and
trying to make those two places seem a little less remote. This is an
album that bridges spaces.
So tonight I’m advising you to splash something robust into a cup and
walk outside and listen to the new Quiet Ones album. Maybe you’ll find
that it stays with you. Maybe it will be one of those albums that’s
there on the nights when you most need it. Because it’s like John sings
about love: “Your bad things aren’t yours anymore. Now they’re shared
with someone else who cares.” The Quiet Ones have gathered from across
the country to share a good thing. I think you will care.
----Aaron Mesh