Bleep

After a decade of friendship, and finally writing music in the same room together, Still House Plants are completely locked in on their third album If I don’t make it, I love u. It’s as if they’re cerebrally connected, never faltering through accelerating stop start rhythms and decelerating molten, elastic tempos. That level of synergy is the result of years spent honing and rehearsing their performances: following the band's earlier tapes on Scottish label GLARC, Long Play stretched its limbs as the trio felt out the LP format, before breaking all of its rules with the innovative Fast Edit.

Four years on from their last LP, each member of the band has reached a virtuosic proficiency in their respective field. David Kennedy’s drums lumber and thrash with sophistication, Finlay Clark’s resonating, gauzy guitars soak in melodic texture, and Jess Hickie-Kallenbach’s completely captivatingly raw, husky vocals burn with searing honesty, authenticity, and irreverence. Dextrous, elegant guitar work ushers in wild strums and frenetic drums, as lyrics are cycled through with intense expression, and distortion rends the tracks in two.

The title implies an urgency that reveals the record’s life and drive, its insistence on foregoing the conformity of grammar to forefront raw emotional power. Yet the band have a desire to zoom in and elongate these moods like never before, constantly oscillating on tracks like ‘Silver grit passes thru my teeth’ that spiral in melody and force, before galloping into the gnarled, grazed, bleeding heart of the record. Those woozy and sluggish moments are deeply sensitive, and tumble into the moments of sprinting, dynamic life or death emotionality.

Still House Plants have cultivated their connection as a trio to land a defiant belter of an album. The term “modern classic” gets thrown around often but would not be out of place to describe this staggering achievement.