The Holy Trinity: Part One

How Hazel English’s double EP kicked off a season of moving music discovery.

In 2018, three recent records popped into my life at the exact same time. Each has their own sonic footprint, each share sonic features with each other, and each left a deep, lasting impression upon me. Over the next three weeks, I’ll talk about each individually. I call them: The Holy Trinity.

I am 28 years old, it is a warm season in Portland, OR, I’m living in a wonderful part of town with my partner, and I’m listening to my favorite TV and Hollywood industry podcast “The Watch”, and I am offered several music recommendations: a trio of artists that one of the show’s hosts has recently seen live/listened to new projects from. The live act was a performer named Hazel English, an Australian/American indie pop musician in Oakland, CA.

I drive home from work in the bright and nourishing sun, and upon arrival, I reach into the Spotify search bar to find English’s most recent release, the double EP Just Give In/Never Going Home.

In combination, a bass and snare drum count us in, and English’s voice, distant and reverberant, keys us into the pace and energy of nearly the entire project: driving and vibrant, while keeping itself at a careful distance from headbanging rock or dancefloor pop, existing in some liminal state. It’s a very specific vibe, echoing dream pop and noise rock, the tempo never slowing too much, the lyrics and vocals soft and steady.

While far from my first dip into the genre, Just Give In/Never Going Home achieved a flavor that I had not yet tasted; some kind of new Neopolitan with recognizable parts carefully placed together into one carton. It filled in the spaces of my warm, sunny evenings with a soothing sound that also had a strong drive belt, suggesting me towards action (chores, socializing, writing, strolling).

Wasted on this feeling

Helpless to this call

The record doesn’t have the largest range of styles across its 37 minutes, which made it a perfect set-it-and-forget-it pick for a bunch of occasions. It evokes a remarkably specific image in my head, of a small backyard get-together, held in a brick faced apartment’s twelfth-of-an-acre grass backyard, lit with warm, soft string lights and filled with chattering friends and light beers, and there’s a bit of a daze, or a haze; a motion-blur as time progresses kindly but briskly.

English talks of being stifled and conflicted throughout the tracklist, and longs to be somewhere else or feel something else, but like most records I love, I’m mostly here for the textures of the production, the warmth and brightness of the chords and the vocal qualities and their progressions. But the songwriting definitely shines through in spurts, grabbing my attention and adding people, places, and things to the self-imagined imagery already floating in my head.

The seventh track, Make It Better, cuts through the noise like a hot knife, especially upon my first listen. Its structure and progression are more tailored to a lyrical piece, taking a firm shape of verses and of a chorus. And it’s here that a different vibe, a different energy, starts breaking through my listening filters and makes itself known: sadness.

All of these thoughts I have

Negate each other

I keep trying to understand

How to make it better

But I can’t make it better

The next song, Control, puts its foot in that foothold, and proceeds with the inclusion of minor keys and an emotionally down-turned selection of chords. It’s Not Real, coming on next, has a similar tone. I’m Fine acknowledges that there is something wrong, head on: “I, I can’t deny, I’m paralyzed from the inside, everyday I wake up to feel the same”.

Quite suddenly, while enjoying a comforting play through of an album, this warm summer night has taken a turn for the melancholy; the sun starts to set, and the chattering dies down, and the dim string lights emit a light that isn’t quite bright enough. But the drive belt that moves the music along keeps driving, and it hasn’t lost a step; it’s just pulling us toward a different horizon.

Somewhere in these couple of tracks is where cracks start to creep into my consciousness, my understanding. There are things I haven’t, and won’t, see — in myself, in my life, in my world — unless I look for them. There are questions emerging with no answers, a liminal state.

Then we get to the final song, That Thing, and we find solace; solace in another, and in physical touch, and outside ourselves. It’s warm, and loving, and a bit perplexing. Guided back into something positive, I’m left with an itch of curiosity. What was that pang of insecurity, that fear, that longing? Was it a blip on the radar? Was it a lapse of self? Was it a sign of true self, of a truth?

The answer would come, crashing, when I continued my sonic journey in an Alabama band’s fourth album. That’s next week.