Pressing Concerns: Downhaul, ‘How to Begin’

Release date: September 20^th
Record label: Self Aware/Landland Colportage
Genre: Alt-country, emo-indie rock, power pop, roots rock, folk rock
Formats: Vinyl, cassette, digital

My favorite moment on How to Begin, the third album from Richmond rock band Downhaul, comes about a minute into the song “YCBTT”. The entire song is impressive, of course–Andrew Seymour’s skipping drumbeat and Robbie Ludvigsen’s classic rock opening riff are perfect out of the gate, singer Gordon Phillips’ distinctive long-steady-gut-punch is in vintage form, and when he trades off lead vocals with Seymour for a few lines (which they do elsewhere on the record, too), it’s an inspired, unorthodox decision. The moment I’m thinking of happens after that, though, in what I guess is the pre-chorus–Phillips grinds the song to a halt with a whammy of a realization (“Well I guess I just thought / About you more than you thought about me”) and Seymour answers by beginning a bright, almost cartoon-like percussive roll. Phillips rattles off hyper-specific, esoteric lines that are nonetheless quite evocative (“But the branch cracked like rock candy / And the devil is left-handed / Came down in a panic to / To the place we both were planted”), sidestepping the music without breaking eye contact. I called their last album, 2021’s PROOF, “cinematic”, which in my mind meant evoking serious, gritty, greyscale prestige-action-thrillers–on this emblematic moment of How to Begin, Downhaul are instead producing a slick movie-musical. 

Three years after their last album, the quartet return with a new LP mastering an entirely different skill set; the funny thing is, though, Downhaul didn’t exactly disappear in between PROOF and How to Begin. Last year, they put out an EP called Squall as well as two-non album singles–in terms of runtime, that’s nearly as much music as there is on How to Begin (oh, and Phillips put out an entire solo album the year before that, too). In hindsight, the trail from the massive-sounding, post-rock-indebted emo-alt-rock of PROOF to the laconic, polished-up, alt-country/power pop-infused How to Begin comes into clearer focus with these interstitial releases. It’s superficially counterintuitive in the case of Squall–the four-song EP is actually “one movement”, recalling the excesses of prog and “art rock”, but there’s actually a bunch of smart pop moments built into it, and it’s really a lot more streamlined than it seems on the surface. “The Riverboat” and “Welcome”, while still being a bit hesitant to fully embrace the rootsier sound of early Downhaul that finally resurfaces on How to Begin, also serve as a dry run for an album in which the quartet consciously decided to go into the studio with the attitude of honing the songs into sharp points rather than “adding onto” them (one where Phillips specifically brings up “the campfire test” as an inspiration–or aspiration–for the record).

The band went to Go West Recording and recorded How to Begin with Mitch Clem, and they came away with a twenty-five minute, ten-song album that does indeed make just about every effort possible to present Downhaul as a band with a keen sense of guitar pop music. Not that this was some huge stretch, mind you–Downhaul have always been underrated hook merchants, and Phillips’ work both with the band on his own is full of proof (Seasonal, his solo album, is pretty much just him and an acoustic guitar, meaning that it passes the campfire test by default). Downhaul just have never been a conventional pop band–and How to Begin isn’t a conventional pop album, either. Songs end almost at the exact moment when they feel they’ve made their point where other bands would stretch another verse or chorus out of them, Phillips’ lyrics are just as thorny and gripping as ever (no watering-down to be found here, no), and Downhaul as a whole still feel like a band that exists in their own little world. That is to say, it’s still a Downhaul album, even as the band have shifted around their angles of attack in executing it.

Opening track “Blue Flame” also has a moment about a minute into the song that blows me away–it’s when the band slips into power chords and steady percussion to launch Phillips’ most memorable line of the song (“California funeral – it oughta be raining, shouldn’t it?”) streaming through the air. The trick of “Blue Flame” is that it eats its cake and has it too–it leans into automatically-pleasing moments like that, but it’s so much more than them, with Phillips’ elemental writing doing the less-obvious but arguably even more important moment of shading the song and situating us for Downhaul’s latest show. It’s a performance with acrobatics–single “Sinker” balances the immediate rootsy instrumental with lyrics that begins with “That shit takes time”, and the powerful mid-tempo “Solstice” takes the pop vehicle into choppy waters regarding uncertainty (“If I never know / If I never know can I live with that?”) and even futility (“Half of the leaves won’t grow back / In the coming spring, and you know that / But you plant in the fall like we can win ‘em all”).

Downhaul populate How to Begin with songs that do the right thing at the right time. “Off and On” is the musical-theater version of PROOF, condensing that album’s serious alt-rock into a quick, digestible two minutes, where “Tired of Trying” is a reminder that so much great art out there is frazzled and dramatic about it (there’s a moment in that one where Phillips rhymes “enzymes” with “slant rhymes”, which would be the most memorable line on any record that wasn’t How to Begin by Downhaul) and “Sleep in the Sunroom” is pure, unfiltered desperation in power pop form. It’s the world of Downhaul, which jars us all “out of it” just when said world starts to seem all-consuming. I’ve been noticing Phillips’ allusions to gardening and plant care in his writing for some time now, but How to Begin is where this really (sigh) blossoms–these moments sometimes read like counterbalances to the chaotic interpersonal nature of some of Phillips’ lyrics, other times like unmistakable metaphors. 

Either way, when Phillips sings about trees and root rot and branches breaking in the wind, it feels like Downhaul’s strongest connections to the outside world. It’s integral to “Rootbound”, the one song on How to Begin that truly has the stamp of finality to it (“I know that it’s over,” Phillips declares, at the very least sounding stronger on this record than when the song initially appeared as a stark acoustic song on Seasonal). It also sets the stage for “Branch”, the final song on the record, which begins with a tree limb falling and splitting “like chopsticks on the lawn”. “It’s windy as hell in Richmond,” Phillips sings, the record’s lone reminder that all of this is taking place in a real mid-sized American city, and then just second later: “There’s comfort in routine / And easing off your dreams will make space for new ones”. The juxtaposition of known (“comfort in routine”) and unknown (finding “new” dreams) could seem contradictory, I suppose, but I think I get it. Jettison the branches that are giving you too much trouble, drop the leaves when it’s time to go dormant. Wait for the right conditions, and then bolt. Grow as much as you can, bloom if you can this year but hold out if it’s not in the cards. Make a bunch of records from different vines that all kind of sound the same. Make something that seems beautifully effortless, colorful and natural. Let them take the fruit thinking that it really was as simple as the final product looks–you’ll always know the rest. (Bandcamp link)