*Live from the Attic* is five tracks of a band refusing to hide. No overdubs, no corrective surgery in post-production, no studio flattery. Just musicians in a room, playing songs that evidently matter to them enormously. The result is the kind of document that reminds you why rock music, at its most unadorned, retains a power that no amount of algorithmic playlist engineering can manufacture.
"Fine Time" opens with a tritone guitar figure that coils around itself like something caught and refusing to be still. When the grunge-weight riff finally drops, it lands with the satisfaction of a long-held argument finally spoken aloud. Frontman Steven Higginbotham — a man whose voice carries the particular authority of someone who once nearly lost it — delivers lyrics about war's machinery and the obscene profits extracted from human suffering. The sarcasm is surgical. This is not the finger-pointing of a folk ballad; it is the controlled fury of a band who have thought carefully about what they're angry at.
"Smokescreen" is where the record reveals its most intriguing texture. The Sonic Youth comparison will be made, and it is not wrong, but it undersells the song's genuine philosophical ambition. Higginbotham navigates the contemporary cacophony of competing certainties — the culture of absolute conviction, the ideological trench warfare of our present moment — and arrives, unexpectedly, at something close to grace. His "place deep inside the wave" is not escapism; it is the argument that music itself constitutes a form of truth that ideology cannot colonise. That's a genuinely sophisticated thought delivered through a hypnotic, fuzz-smeared groove. Quite a trick.
"Rainbows" pivots so sharply it might give you whiplash, and all credit to the band for having the nerve to do it. The 1960s melodicism sits surprisingly naturally against the 1990s alternative grain, and the track's open-hearted celebration of LGBTQ+ identity carries none of the self-congratulatory smugness that so often mars well-intentioned political pop. It simply sounds like people insisting on their right to exist on their own terms. The vocal hook is, frankly, irresistible.
"Desire" is the record's most architecturally ambitious moment. It begins with clean, jangly restraint before gradually accumulating weight and complexity, a cello-accompanied middle section arriving like a sudden clearing in dense woodland. Built to Spill and The Shins are invoked in the press materials, and the lineage is audible, but the song's meditation on creative passion withering beneath the repetition of daily obligation feels lived-in rather than borrowed. When the anthemic finale arrives, it has been earned.
Closing track "Day After Day" is the record's emotional apex. The call-and-response between Higginbotham and keyboardist Erin Rodgers is one of those moments that reminds you how rarely chemistry between musicians can actually be engineered — either it exists in the room or it doesn't, and here it crackles with unmistakable life. The subject matter is trauma and the grinding, unglamorous work of recovery. The song does not offer resolution, and this is precisely its strength. Healing, it suggests, is not an event but a practice. Day after day after day.
*Live from the Attic* functions simultaneously as document and declaration. It bridges whatever the band has been toward whatever they are about to become — a full-length, *One More Thing To Say*, is promised later this year — while demanding to be heard entirely on its own terms. This is music made by people who have been at it long enough to know that the room, the moment, and the honesty are all that actually count.
Don't let them remain Houston's best-kept secret any longer.