I'm mostly up for Portland, Oregon. Summer Houses is the up part of it as they're the type of band that reminds me of that city. Weirdos like me knew that Portland lived the "keep it weird" moniker long before Austin grabbed the branding. For me, it started with Azerrad's biography about Nirvana, where he talks about the Satyricon where Kurt and Courtney met. Since then, a number of bands I grew up on, Sleater-Kinney, Elliot Smith, the Dandy Warhols, and Modest Mouse to name four, have dominated large periods of my life along with Portland by proxy.
Aside from that, I've never been to Portland but I've long been fed the view that they contain a creative and poltically active bunch. Bandcamp has the most info about what's behind this band on a page that also identifies them as Electric Castle for other projects. Other artists or collaborators are also included such as LOUD and We Kill Police.
All of the projects on the site share an experimental approach to their work, going back to 2017 with some earlier recordings too. Frantic Hearts is one of many releases from Summer Houses alone but it comes across as a kind of reset to me because, in a more recent release, prime mover Hazel Sterling Clemente released early recordings as Electric Castle (Jul 28, 2023) revealing their current state of being.
"I'm finally getting gender affirming care. In these early stages I've been feeling so, so alone. Detached from my world, my community. Detached from my band, detached from my best friends. Feeling like my inside world of lonesomeness, my safe space, the place where nobody can hurt me, has spilled out all over the place. It's become the world around me. I feel naked to the elements. But I'm trying to remind myself that I'm not doing this to be detached, I'm doing this to be more connected; to others, the world and this body. More connected than I've ever allowed myself to be. I first need to reconnect with myself."
Some of these feelings seem to come through in Frantic Hearts which will be explained in the review, which I feel is very personal to Hazel in a different time and place for the artist.
Don't Break 'Frantic Hearts' In Summer Houses
I'm in a time and place in my life where I can express certainty with the direction I'm heading. I vaguely remember a time in my younger life when I was timid. Maybe I can conjure up some memory of a particular situation. Hazel Sterling Clemente has the greater advantage of being seen than I ever did, and plenty of tools at hand to document these experiences with plenty of feedback.
I always worry that I'm not getting the message as the artist wants the listener to receive it. The best anyone can do is to put these things through their filter. For instance, with "TELEVISION", I hear "The Passion of Lovers" by Bauhaus in the guitar trilling. Dylan Barstow's organ keyboards have that vintage New York street sound. The dynamics go from a quiet setup of the scene to fury intensified. What I'm hearing is that the character is asking someone to pay more attention to them. That they exist and they're not doing anything other than watching TV. The track that follows, "One More Mile" has a rhythm like any select number of tracks off of early Adicts album. What I was able to gather from the lyrics is:
"Lightspeed waiting down the road. Can't get what I need. Can't hit the right speed, don't have the right frame of mind. I need it. Beat myself up all the time. A hundred miles on my run and down the street I'm out of time. One more mile and when I take a right, street light. One more smile and then I left your side down the street and out of site."
Now, looking at some of the lyrics to "Frantic Start":
"and in the nighttime again, the music keeps going but not till the morning I'm dawning or quiet it's a new age of sleep coming from way over there I've seen it in my dreams, and in my dreams, I'm on the job there I am, here I am. I had a frantic start, just stops my heart. I wake up without rest. my heart pounds like thunder, beats right out of my chest. I gave it all I've got... 'cause you stole my heart.
Is this about insomnia and anxiety? In an interview with Auroara, she explained to me the need to give our nervous systems a break which is always under attack from day to day. Our character in this song, Hazel, can't seem to rest and when they're dreaming, and when they're awake, they're not present. Every day is a frantic start to the point where one day bleeds into the other. In the end, this person seems to be such a daily wreck until we find the reason is because they're in love with someone. I can relate to having feelings like this when I was younger, but never written out so clearly. That whole certainty thing I mentioned before, I'm pretty certain I won't have the type of feelings this song describes ever again. It's tracks like this, however, that make me applaud Clemente for documenting these things in such a way that they can always reflect on them in the future. These days for me, I only have faded starts.
NTHNL, 'COSMIC FLUTE RIDES AGAIN' (REVIEW & INTERVIEW)
PAUL SUPREME, 'MILWAUKEE'S BEAST' (REVIEW & INTERVIEW)
GUIDED MEDITATION OF A 'DIARY OF AN ARTIST IN LOVE' BY THE MUSE FREQUENCY (REVIEW & INTERVIEW)
FROM EARWORMS TO DEEP CUTS, CHANDRA NAIR'S SINGLES HAVE PLENTY
By this time in the album, I feel there's some strong character building it's when we hit "Winner's Circle", that we hit a new dynamic. That is, it's stripped down with Clemente on the electric guitar, the only one on the entire album. I gather this track is about getting out of homelessness.
"Say you want it better but you don't want it better. Don't you want it better?"
With "Sunny Disposition", we get a similar melody from "Winner's Circle" but with the dynamics that naturally come with a band: Barstow's keyboards take more of a lead here. I'm looking for my friend but they're nowhere to be found. When you talk in my voice, and pick up the gun, you rob me blind. Round of applause, and then roaring thunder, don't say that there's something rotting in the water. when the fires came and cleaned up all the grime. Around the corner, I'm told to take a left, no one here everybody was upset when the police came and cleaned up all the crime.
"Wartime", this time it's war, this time it's personal." God grant me strength, I need you right now." Is about a person who is about to unleash. "Everyone is holding their breath and waiting for the bombs to drop." Then It's at about 5:18 that we start to hear something else develop. This is soundtrack storytelling where they let loose. The grinding electronics from the synths, the bass, drums, and guitar effects.
"By Nightfall" lets the bass take the lead. The punk aesthetic of "One More Mile" continues in this track. Is there some concern that someone they care about won't be in by nightfall? Then there's the "don't harm me I'm just a boy" which might speak to the threats that take place after hours. At 2:23, it begins to get a bit more dramatic with the wall of guitar effects. The interchange between this and the music from the beginning makes this moment in the song that is also similar to the soundtrack-like dynamics of "Wartime". In a way, a combination of much of what we've heard throughout this release.
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What's The Verdict On 'Frantic Hearts'
Reset or not, it's acknowledged that this is actually Summer Houses' album debut despite the multiple other releases. Years in the making, I was right about this being a moment for Clemente to look back on. In an interview about this release (August 03, 2023), they say:
“In those years, I gave up on a satisfactory life that I could live and put all of my emotional energy and what little free time I had after work into composing Frantic Hearts, with it in mind that if I’m doomed to live without connection or being seen as myself in my daily life, then the only thing I can do is leave behind exactly how I feel in hopes that someone I may never meet will hear it and see me."
With Frantic Hearts coming from a personal place, putting in the energy to make it happen is a very personal endeavor and therefore a portrait of the artist in transition, literally and figuratively. The compositions, the arrangements, and the mixing all came with a plan that came from trial and error. There is a certain level of certainty with the narrative in that it's part of a final product. The sense I get is that a lot had to be said, sometimes without an ending, leaving things open-ended or in the abstract. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, a lot of the artists I've done interviews with meet the same dilemma with no sense of closure. In this case, I feel that this is a living document that will continue to grow with every listen and along with Hazel.
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