The Hotelier - Goodness

Pitchfork 80

Christian Holden is fighting like hell to stand in the sun. The Hotelier singer is coming off a dramatized retelling of a tragedy-ridden early adulthood, in the form of the fourth-wave emo classic Home, Like NoPlace Is There, and now it’s time to really start rebuilding. That’s a lot to expect of a record, but it’s not like the Hotelier can’t handle the pressure. The Massachusetts trio are angling for that rare genre-rock to general-rock crossover space, and Goodness is their most concerted bid yet. Home, Like NoPlace Is There—the Hotelier’s second album, released in 2014—suggested their appeal to listeners outside of emo revival’s grasp (alongside the likes of the World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am Not Afraid to Die and Modern Baseball), and it’s hype that’s only reaffirmed by Goodness. At this point, however, it might not even be accurate to call them emo, so let’s just have it out now: The Hotelier is a great rock band, however you classify them.

This is not to say Goodness doesn't have its share of histrionics, though to be fair they are more like affirmations. The album flirts with transcendentalism, the 19th-century philosophical movement favored by Emerson and Thoreau, which recognized the inherent goodness of humanity and the natural world while also placing a high value on fierce individuality. And so Goodness finds itself out in the fields of New England, stripping back to the essentials—trying to love and trust again, and finally moving the fuck on. Anyone who has attempted these things understands that they can rank among the most difficult emotional tasks, depending on how bad other humans have messed you up. Home, Like NoPlace Is There took often-excruciating stock of that damage: It opened with a suicide, lingered uncomfortably on a funeral scene, and reckoned with the psychological ravages of a lifetime of abuse. At times Goodness pushes towards positivity with this same level of intensity, but it’s fraught with its own kind of tension: You can really hear the trying.

Sometimes it’s grating, how hard Goodness tries to find the light. The album is broken up with campfire-y interludes of peaceful chants atop acoustic guitar, which were “sung under a total lunar eclipse in Plymouth, Vermont” according to official credits. We are also treated to a recitation of the lullaby “I See the Moon,” Holden’s spoken-word introduction to the album, and “a sound collage recorded of morning birds in Charlton, Massachusetts.”

Other times, it’s the trying that draws you in. The percussion is so relentless, the guitars so urgent, the voice so direct, that songs like “Goodness Pt. 2” and “Piano Player” feel like something that could get you out of bed in the morning. For much of the latter, Holden can be heard—in either the foreground or in the background amid utter sonic chaos—screaming what may be the most realistic mantra ever chanted: the word “sustain.” That said, this same sort of trick is not as profound the second time Holden pulls it, spending a fair chunk of “Sun” simply repeating its title. At least that underwhelming passage results in Holden’s most indelible punk vocal on the entire album, and it's a throaty blow that stands in stark contrast to the calmer, Stipe-like tone Holden employs here more than ever.

For as riotous as it can sound, Goodness is remarkably precise in how it plays with dynamics and layers. This manifests in myriad ways: the music cutting out to emphasize Holden’s poetic pleas to feel alive, the disregard for traditional song structures, the way the two guitars have a near-constant interplay that adds dimensions (and hooks), and the slow and tense introduction of more instruments over the course of a song, like on the mortality-obsessed standout “Opening Mail for My Grandmother.”

Simply put, the playing is more ambitious and varied on Goodness than on Home, Like NoPlace Is There, an album where the narrative drama manifests into some of the rawest anthems of unhinged youth and crippling self-loathing recorded this decade. But Goodness’ judicious sense editing clips the band’s wings just a little, keeping the music from feeling as boundless as Holden’s emotions. Still, it’s admirable, all this searching for the good and appreciating the simple. At the end of Home highlight “The Scope of All This Rebuilding,” the singer had found himself defeated, admitting, “I can’t find my way around this.” Goodness is proof that somehow, Christian Holden did.