The truce between lush greenery and dark clouds that characterizes autumn in the Northwest stands squarely at the intersection of melancholy and striking beauty. It’s the same place where Night Showers, the great new full-length from Seattle band Hotels, often stands.
Hotels frontman/lead songwriter/bassist Blake Madden has never been wanting for sonic ambition, delivering epic guitar pop with glittering new-wave keyboards, heady swirls of ambient noise, and cinematic sweep throughout most of his band’s recordings. Hotels even busted out a concept album in 2011 (On the Casino Floor) that mixed those sonic ingredients into a James Bond/ pulp sci-fi super spy scenario.
With its emphasis on real strings, horns, and marimbas, Night Showers sees Madden redirecting his ambitions sonically. There’s a marked shift in his songwriting and execution, with more nuanced atmospherics and sophisticated melodies coming to the fore. It’s Hotels’ most organic-sounding record, and it’s also, beyond a shadow of a doubt, their best work yet.
Madden’s crafted a genuinely timeless batch of songs here, with shadings of Belle and Sebastian, Burt Bacharach, Leonard Cohen, and Brian Wilson frequently informing things. On “Mom,” Madden paints a bittersweet lyrical portrait of (I’m assuming) his mother: He sings the line, “Miss your face, your warm embrace, see you in a better place” with a deadpan croon all the more affecting and disarming in its simplicity, even as a bright trumpet line gooses along a relatively upbeat melody.
There’s a thread of darkness running through much of Night Showers, one that fully emerges on “Tony Leung,” where a mournful trumpet, moody strings, and a skeletal marimba back Madden’s most haunted croon while guest vocalist Irene Barber’s lovely trill floats in the distance like a ghost. And another powerhouse guest singer, Fly Moon Royalty’s Adra Boo, takes centerstage on the equally, ravishingly dark “Wildwood.”
Blake Madden of Hotels. (photo: Tony Kay)
But Madden finds playfulness and romantic excitement in the dark corners, too. With its tinkling xylophones and spy-movie guitars, “Five Days in the Hole” sounds like a goth band with Lionel Hampton serving as a sideman, and “Richard Bennett” gives in to a sensual, gently funky groove and strings that apparently wandered in from a Curtis Mayfield record.
The real instruments coursing through the record lend a sense of warmth, whether it’s the sad strings giving way to the irresistibly percolating new wave chamber pop of “Green Apples,” or the muted trumpet wailing through the evocative, instrumental title track. And the production on Night Showers just might be local soundboard wizard Erik Blood’s finest, most lush work ever. He and Madden collaborate so famously, it could easily be either man (or both) behind the incredible dynamics—whisper-to-a-roar contrasts and unexpected sonic downshifts—that make the record so rewarding with each successive listen.
One of the many pleasant surprises of this captivating record is Madden’s singing. Pitched somewhere in the vicinity of Lou Reed’s monotone, Leonard Cohen’s drone, and the slightly-skewed croon of The Strokes’ Julian Casablancas, his atypical voice is a taste well worth acquiring. And with its tinges of awkward beauty and weary melancholy, it fits the material to a T.
Hotels headline the release party for Night Showers tonight at South Lake Union’s Lo-Fi, with a fleshed-out lineup that’ll be playing the album in its entirety as well as a gaggle of the band’s earlier tracks. If the live representation of the record is one-tenth as choice as the record itself, it’ll be totally worth staying out late on a school night for.
