#005: Hop Along - Somewhere a Judge
Death, indiscriminate drags off the newborn buck with the broken leg
In the shadow of conversations had while I was asleep
In the non-existent video version of this post, you find the author walking down a nondescript street. A normal guy, doing normal things, earbuds in whilst he runs some errands. He becomes aware of a distant voice, calling out for someone's attention. Normal ambient noise, easily ignored. The hand that falls not threateningly, but still urgently, on his shoulder is not so easily brushed off. He spins around to be greeted by an unusual sight. Himself, sweaty and breathless.
"You forgot your shoes."
He looks down at his shoeless feet, holes in his socks now visibly creeping around the sides.
"Idiot." he says. He wakes up.
He's overlooked something obvious, see.
Before last week, I had never heard of Hop Along, the popular indie rock band who released three acclaimed records in the 2010s before promptly disappearing off the face of the earth. I like to think of myself as vaguely plugged into the alternative music zeitgeist. I'm obviously not. This post is my apology.
Hop Along are an excellent band, who one can only ascribe the most reductive of genre terms to, but offer so much more than such a generic descriptor. They are an indie rock band only in the sense that they synthesise many disparate threads of that broad form into a knotty and unpredictable style all of their own, unique but always accessible. Their roots in the US freak folk scene are evident in the non-linear routes their songs travel, the arrangements diverting, divergent, the melodies sometimes sharp as a tack, sometimes a loose rubber band. They rock with composure, twist with poise, and project intensity in their moments of calm.
But it's vocalist, lyricist and guitarist Frances Quinlan who elevates Hop Along into the pantheon of milestone alternative bands. Her impressionistic lyrics, and wildly varied delivery of them, are a blast of jet engine air to the face, once heard, never forgotten, impossible to confuse with any contemporary. Oscillating between sweet and sour is nothing new in indie rock, but there is something about the clarity of Quinlan's vocals that gets me. The tender moments, the screams, everything in between, feels so punchy and precise. She's capable of a catchy concise hook, all the way to stretching a melody to breaking point. That she existed as a solo artist prior and post Hop Along does not come as a surprise.
I haven't written about this song. Why? I feel like a fraud, a true Johnny Come Lately to this band. I'm still absorbing their music, and I can't do it fast enough. So many of their songs feel like miniature, garage symphonies, each worth poring over to perceive every possible thread buried within the music. So far, I feel like I'm only part way towards internalising their most recent album, 2018's Bark Your Head Off, Dog, and the only song I feel qualified to write about from that record is this, Somewhere a Judge.
Arguably their most accessible song to date, a squirmy, dissonant guitar part leads us in, an uneasy staccato pulse, perfectly in step with the violence Quinlan details. A newborn deer with a broken leg. Death row executions, rushed through in order to beat the expiration date on the administered drugs. The band leads us out of this knot, the guitars falling in time, and into harmony, for an absolutely killer chorus. When Quinlan sings "Afternoon vanilla sun crawls away across the lawn", it cuts through the surreal darkness of the surrounding lyrics like the proverbial ray of sunshine. But, such is life, we're never truly out of the woods, as she follows it up with the decidedly Lynchian "Through the phone I pull you and drag your voice around". The song continues to lurch between these two tonal poles throughout, before marrying the two in the extended, closing refrain. That line, "I don't know why I'm so mean each time I come to visit" is as an obvious singalong moment, perfectly encapsulating the oddness, the otherness at the heart of Hop Along. I can't wait to learn more about them. I can't wait for them to maybe, one day, come back to us.