"Locust Avenue” — the first LP from Nettles — is an indie offering with built-in surprises. What first comes across as peaceful, pleasant folk — well-suited for easy listening — quickly reveals itself to be more profound than expected.
Nettles has roots at the University — songwriter Guion Pratt completed an MFA in poetry at the University. The band’s instrumentalists come and go, but the current lineup also features a music composition graduate student, as well as an environmental sciences undergraduate.
Using the word ‘poetic’ to describe “Locust Avenue” is akin to throwing around the word ‘wet’ when discussing the ocean. Each song is poetry set to music, and the result is an album so lyrically rich that the listener is seized by a desire to write down the words and hang them up somewhere.
In just nine tracks, the album flies through topics from exploding lanterns to impressionist paintings, but relationships are a sustained theme.
“Annuals” kicks off the album with a metaphor — love is a flower that must be replanted: “sew me each season / I will not come back on my own.” The wisdom that love requires tending floats over rhythmic guitar cascades as images of dandelions growing in cracks on a blacktop are placed next to descriptions of space travel. The guitar and the refrain are constants which keep the listener anchored as the lyrics soar.
Moving towards literary inspiration, “Brando” is written from the perspective of Stanley Kowalski from “A Streetcar Named Desire.” The increasingly insistent flute mirrors an escalating conflict, and the instruments hush with every respite the narrator takes from his anger. Ultimately the narrator is “thunder with no lightning / bark but no bite” as he is cast outside. The lyrics are supported perfectly by the instrumentation, with an interplay of flute and voice evoking Jethro Tull.
“Paw” moves past ideas of lovers to commentate the effects of injury on friends and family. The song’s subject is a lantern accident which ends in a friend being lit on fire. The listener is walked through the aftermath with imagery of hospitals and hardening skin, and one has no choice but to empathize with the singed body “wanting wholeness now departed.” When a loved one is pulled away by illness, families become that burned body. This idea is emphasized by the line “half out of you and half out of us” — health is communal.
The title track returns to themes of love, but this time the metaphor lies with insects. The singer uses a collective we and addresses his friends, which are locusts. It’s a short story that starts off like Kafka, but ultimately moves from weird to universal when the locusts describe love. The phrase “Join me all-consuming beast / the self discards itself for love and eats” allows the singer to pair locusts molting with the way people are transformed by relationships.
As Guion writes, “love demands a form.” Love shapes people and can force them to change. “Locust Avenue” features some of the most brilliant and outrageously intricate lyrics of the whole record, and the use of locusts evokes ideas of love intertwining with greed while remaining a natural process.
As lyrically-driven as the album is, “Locust Avenue” needs its instruments. The players lend a tone to the softly-spoken lyrics, carrying and supporting them while still respecting their central position. The rolling guitar picking on the later tracks amplifies their story-like sound, and the Page/Plant-esque back-and-forth of flute and vocals breathes life into the poems.
Nettles’ musicians set the mood especially well with “The Quarry,” picking up the pace in what starts off as a danceable tune. It begins with a sing-song recollection of time spent with a friend diving in a quarry, and the instruments narrate the scene themselves with gentle guidance from Guion’s lyrics. The diversity of imagery is top notch once again, pulling listeners from dusty quarries to “an orbitless planet.” Distinct among the tracks, “The Quarry” plays like a bard’s chronicle sung in a tavern, weaving a tale of the past.
The album ends with the pensive “Pyramid of Skulls,” inspired by Cezanne’s oil painting of the same name. Touching on ideas of death, as the painting itself does, the song also explores writer’s block and artists trapped by their own creations in endless cycles. The lamentation of one whose friend has been imprisoned by obsession is clearly expressed, as Guion croons “I’ve been watching him paint the same skulls every day / and I say “Let’s move on, let’s talk about anything else!” A heavy masterpiece with heavy themes, the song is like the painting in more ways than one.
Nettles’ recent debut is a goldmine, and a testament to the University’s ability to produce artists who are masters of their craft. While at first similar in sound to acts like Sufjan Stevens, the songs found here rise above any comparisons. Here’s hoping that a second LP isn’t too far away.
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