Babehoven - i see them, i see me review
The New York duo’s third record had every ingredient to be at least annoying, and at worst cloying - and it never is.
Perhaps unlike any other genre, a sort of inverse law applies to the experience of listening to the average folk song; a happy folk trooper triggers an oddly melancholic response, whilst melancholic folk music triggers a sort of lilted and wavering comfort. That’s my highly contestable, tender-staged theory, anyway - and one that might be either dead on arrival, or true with a few exceptions - because whilst listening to Hudson, New York folk duo Babehoven’s third studio album, ‘I See Them, I See Me’, I found myself curiously uplifted before (from excitement), during, and after the listening experience in spite of its ever-dimorphous tone.
Perhaps, then, my reaction to this particular record has far less to do with my subjective experience of the average folk song, and more to do with the particular form of emotional tact that they equip the music with - both on the minute-by-minute level and in grander thematic scope. Grander thematic scope first; ‘I See Them, I See Me’, according to the band, was written in the aftermath of lead singer Maya Bon’s temporary paralysis of her right vocal cord, with the (overshadowingly large) backdrop of everything going on in our backyard: “As things with climate change and the state of the world get more dire and confusing,” Bon shared in a statement on the album, “it’s hard to tell sometimes if what we’re experiencing is reality because it feels so unbelievably grim.” Multi-instrumentalist and producer Ryan Albert agrees, adding, “We have a beautiful life, and also we are witnessing catastrophe after catastrophe happen around the world.” Put together, maybe the record feels exactly as Babehoven wants it to: objectively melancholic at least half of the time (per the chords on the music sheet, anyhow), yet eking pleasure and meaning from circumstance despite the experience rather than from wallowing in the negativity.
Unsurprisingly, then, the strongest moments on the album maintain both moods with equal care. Take album standout ‘When You Look at Me’: the guitar, even if occasionally stroked down to hell and wavering under its own force, often sorts out its problems in mid-air and lands on its feet (if at the last moment). Same goes for Bon’s creamy vocals; her somewhat hopscotchy yet soft-footed rhythmic lines tend to tentatively flip upward at the final turn of phrase throughout the record, even if the words themselves sound clipped from feel-good East Coast wintertime literary classics (The Shining; see other works by Stephen King). And even then, some of her more trying moments are sweetened with light dustings of Christmassy acoustic, moral-support drums, and innocent yarny harp. The duo’s gift of maintaining musical, thematic, and emotional dynamism - without becoming so yin-yang in its balance that everything accidentally turns black and white - is perhaps the album’s most salient strength, and a major coaxing point for the closeted lover of nostalgic folk.
This isn’t to say that the same pattern pertains to every song on the forty-minute track run - but put together, the experience tends to feel cheery without being subtractive or cloying. And even then, the more straightforward and immediately legible moments on the record hold their own merit: closing track ‘Pelorus’, blotted and slightly black-and-blue with repeating cryptic lyrics ‘There’s no one left/There’s no one home’, rather than contradicting the previous wins, perhaps feels more honouring to the optimism-dug-from-horror theme than a final victory lap would. On the other side of the BPM spectrum, ‘Wave Has a Place’, rich with tangy guitar, perfectly-paced, and more irreverent than it immediately seems, sort of feels like being politically corrected by your incredibly sweet middle-aged neighbour - meaning to say, its slight sleight of hand and acerbic delivery reveal their trust in the listener to delight in some subtext rather than skate by on whatever the subtitle would suggest. By inference, then, that trust in the listener only works because of their trust in themselves. Listening to their winking and invitational tone, I’d imagine Babehoven knows that ‘I See Them, I See Me’, unlike many other conventionally catchy folk albums, just gets more impressive post-interrogation.
