Houston in the Blind – Limbs

Fresh off being voted Best Local New Music Act by the readers of Creative Loading, Atlanta/Athens band Houston in the Blind has released their debut album, Limbs. Headed by ephemeral cosmonaut Charlie Garrett, the group has created a beautiful work from modest beginnings.

Originally conceived as a solo project, Garrett initially began fleshing out his songs with producer and longtime friend Kalen Nash of Ponderosa. However, the pair soon drifted towards deep waters in a jet-black night guided only by an air of confidence. The stand-alone songs became their lighthouse, beckoning ships on distant shores to take safe passage in their waterways. An imperial fleet of musicians soon gathered — drummer Darren Dodd (Butch Walker, Ponderosa), keyboardist John Watkins (Dead Confederate, Saint Pé) and singer/bassist Corinne Lee (Snowden) — and the armada eventually set sail for Southern Tracks. Together the band worked to construct the framework for Limbs with the added help of Nash’s wife Aslyn who added keyboard and piano to further enhance the sound palette. Southern Tracks co-owner Ben Holst also contributed, his sleek pedal steel lines floating like sea foam at the crest of a wave.

Limbs is dressed in a melancholy white linen pysch-pop gaze. From a distance it is elegant, but up close it shows signs of wear in its frayed collar and ragged cuffs. Opening track “On Your Side” speaks like a memory coasting on the peripheral of the mind’s eye on a sun-washed day. It’s a mesmerizing introduction to a theme that binds the continuity of the album — the unpredictable nature of the world. Both haunting and alluring, the vocals playfully claw at the cusp of your ear. The words saunter as if a smooth specter slipping in and out of the haze of radio waves culled the melodies from the lingering infection that dispatched it from the bonds of mortal existence. Although much of the album tends to free itself from gravity and the instrumentation feels as if its softly pleading to an unknown soul dressed in distress, the drums bear a strange weight. They attack the heart of the listener with the precise, driving strikes of heavy prayers that are intrinsically understood beyond all the boundaries of custom and language.

Meanwhile, songs like “All My Love” and “I Will Chase Your Ghost” conjure otherworldly extensions. These compositions portend to concerns beyond the everyday malaise of a desk job that fuels back-broken barroom banter and selective cirrhosis. Much as the NASA-born phrase their name suggests, the band, disconnected from convention, uses these songs to launch coded messages to loved ones here and gone with neither a thought of reception or hope of response. “All My Love” asks, “Are you a memory or a dream?” It’s a question that swims in the folds of the unseen, buried deep within the firmament of outer space. This inquisitive perspective links to similar thoughts on “I Will Chase Your Ghost” when Garett sings, “I can see your face/Watch as you drive away.” It frames an image of a human sitting beside themselves, perhaps in grief or lament, burying their face into an underexposed photograph that has taken on the form of a treasured artifact kept out of reach of close company.

The album concludes with a transitory, film-worthy lullaby, “Sleeping Pill.” A lone piano warbles under the warmth of reel-to-reel accompanied only by the flowerless yet graceful fronds of Garett’s falsetto. The song is a momentary downshift in voltage that acts like a poetic volta for Limbs. The rest of the album looks outward whereas this track looks inward, holding possible outcomes to self-responsibility. Garett croons, “Every choice that binds me will have to take the cost/innocence is lost,” and attempts to resolve his existential dilemma with a mantra: “but I try and I try and I try…”

Limbs is a flesh-bound engine. It is powered by its willingness to marinate in both the temporal snapshots of a publicly sober mother sucking off the dregs of a Listerine bottle sub rosa during her nightly bath and Siddhartha moments before reaching Om by the river banks.

Houston in the Blind will celebrate the release of Limbs tonight at Flicker Bar in Athens and Saturday night at the Earl. In Athens, they will be supported by Oak House and Nicholas Mallis & The Borealis for Athens Intensified. Doors open at 9 p.m. In Atlanta, they will be supported by Frosted Orange and Blue Blood. Doors open at 9 p.m. Admission is $8.

More Info
Bandcamp: houstonintheblind.bandcamp.com
Facebook: @houstonintheblindmusic
Instagram: @houstonintheblind
Twitter: @HoustonBlind