The song’s subject is as old as the jukebox: the ache of being rejected by someone you still adore. Most writers treat that predicament as a licence for self-pity. These players treat it as a call to arms. The band describe it, plainly, as a song about “feeling rejection while still in love”, and the plainness is the point. Nobody here is hiding behind irony or a raised eyebrow. They have chosen the biggest emotional gesture available and committed to it with the straight-backed seriousness of people who know that the best heartbreak records never wink.<\/p>
At the foundation sits Izzy the Gent, bassist and producer, whose line and arrangements give the track its spine. A bassline in a ballad is usually a servant, murmuring root notes while the singers take the glory. Here it prowls and leads, and the song moves around it as though pulled by a tide. Everything else is built on that confidence, and you can hear a producer who understands that grandeur is a matter of architecture rather than volume.<\/p>
Above it, the guitars divide the labour with real intelligence. Andy Lund, the band’s newest recruit, plays lines that ache and curl, evocative in the old sense of conjuring a whole rain-slicked street from a handful of bent notes. Ian Dowed, meanwhile, supplies what the band themselves call “the moody cloud”, an atmospheric haze that drifts behind the lead and gives the song its weather. Two guitarists who stay out of each other’s way is a rarer gift than it should be, and the generosity between them is audible.<\/p>
Then come the voices. Sophia Prise and Tobias Hawkins do not so much harmonise as collide, and the song is better for the impact. Their dual vocals climb towards the chorus like two people racing up the same staircase, each refusing to let the other reach the top alone. When they arrive, the effect is properly anthemic, a rush of chest and throat that recalls the days when a chorus was expected to make a stadium weep. It is the sort of singing that makes you forgive the entire decade it comes from.<\/p> Cody Rhodes, who sat in on drums for this recording, deserves particular praise. His playing is a lesson in restraint put to dramatic use. He holds back where lesser drummers would flail, then lands his fills with the weight of a door closing, giving the track what the band accurately call “exactly what it needed”. It is a session performance with the authority of a permanent member.<\/span><\/p> Engineer Rex Shelverton, working at San Francisco’s Secret Studio complex, has given the whole thing a polish that stops short of sterility. The band admit the recording ran long and that delays kept interrupting. They used the time to pile on layers, and the result sounds lavish without ever feeling crowded. Patience has rarely been so handsomely rewarded.<\/span><\/p> The proof, tellingly, came on stage. Placed early in the live set, the song kept getting nudged by audiences towards the finale, and they were right. “Hollow Heart” has the shape of a closer, the slow build and the swell that sends a room home a little altered.<\/span><\/p> It would be easy to file this under nostalgia, and the band’s affection for the form is obvious. But nostalgia is a retreat, and this is an advance. Everything But The Everything have taken a style the world abandoned and played it with such conviction that it sounds, improbably, like news. One of the Bay Area’s most promising young acts has made a heartbreak song that insists on being heard, and I can’t think of a higher compliment.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\nhttps:\/\/everythingbuttheeverything.com\/<\/a>\n\n\n\n\n
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