The Hudson Branch

Over the past few years my tastes have matured, fermented, been racked to a secondary and been allowed to bottle carbonate. That being said, I still love me some music that makes me feel like I'm riding in the back of a pickup truck with my imaginary flowing brown mane of peaceful adult rock deliciousness flipping all over the fucking place. The Hudson Branch, throughout their latest album World Kid, give me that feeling numerous timez, and they've managed to calmly transform my dark loose fitting boot cut jeans into a stone washed, ripped kneed, taut cod piece of a harness for my loins, all while I was wearing them.

And I just noticed this tattered and torn leather bound book of poetry that I had no idea I was writing.

DAMN I'M A SENSITIVE COOZE!

At certain points throughout the record, especially on the track Piggyback, you're comfortably sitting cross legged around a campfire, passing a pipe from right to left, and without even realizing it, everyone around you's singing the same fucking chorus and smiling like life can get no better. It's difficult for me to process the entire album in this same light, but at the numerous points where they kick me in the throat with the feeling of everything being perfect, the kick is solid to my adam's apple and seemingly effortless. Take the entrance of the percussion on Tread Trample Tremble Trampoline, where it drops out and comes back in (with a fucking subtle vengeance), and while I fear alliteration and all things already arbitrating ambivalence and all that, the gentle manner in which they incorporate every fucking sound into the song is fucking godly.

The instrumentation on World Kid is wildly imaginative and original, all at once sounding like a dream sequence from, say, Labyrinth and a random movie scene where a teenager is stretched to the ultimate level of stress for their age range, like say, hiding semen stains with an intentionally accidental spill of a glass of warm milk. The Hudson Branch has their guitars set to dreamy, their keys set to trippy and their vocals set to Matthew Sweet, and I am sucking it all down like a glass of warm milk meant to cover up the spattering of semen stains on my high school self's dark colored bedsheets.

The Hudson Branch combine sounds I'm familiar with, like the above mentioned Matthew Sweet insofar as vocals, but the guitar vs. drum work reminds me of Kejnu, and I fucking LOVE Kejnu hardfuckingcore. Seriously peep the track Muons for a perfect example of what I feel is this band's biggest asset in their combination of gorgeous guitar pick out intricacies and syncopated percussion played out in a beautifully patient display.

If I had to pick one word to describe The Hudson Branch, it would be ilovehowtheymakedifferentinstrumentssoundliketheyvealwaysbelongedtogether. And even though I've never seen a picture of these pricks, I'm sure they're all packing huuuuuuuge meat bro.