House Once Ours and the Tragedy of a Beautiful World
The beauty of our pasts can make the present seem dull.
I sit in my bed, crying, as I listen to “Outro” and contemplate how this idea has applied across my life. Few things are more motivating or crippling than memory. Massachusetts chamber folk band House Once Ours tackles this theme on their album No Beauty Can Move Me Now, one of the most exciting, emotional, and truly human debuts to come out this decade.
No Beauty Can Move Me Now is the brainchild of Eden Wisto, an Arizona-based musician who releases indie folk music under the moniker “frans asthma.” After crafting a chilling central narrative for an album revolving around a narrator’s encounter with death and spirituality, Wisto reached out to various internet acquaintances and collaborators from Indy Cat Recording Co. in Marshfield, Massachusetts. Wisto traveled to Marshfield to entrust his new bandmates Peter Smith, Ryan Bradley, and Jordan Newell with bringing this album concept to life. No Beauty Can Move Me Now was fittingly recorded in a church, giving it a raw and spacious feel as the swirling sounds of clarinets and cellos envelop harrowing, emotive vocals. In an interview with The Georgetown Independent, multi-instrumentalist Ryan Bradley divulged that he is “obsessed with layering everything.” After each successful clarinet or guitar take, he “went back and did it all as one take again,” giving the record its distinctive, full texture. The end product is an album that speaks volumes to the human experience, and one that captivates the listener from the first note to the final breath.
No Beauty Can Move Me Now is an achievement of indie folk music, with warm piano melodies and guitar picking that create a somber yet comforting atmosphere. Bradley’s clarinet playing features prominently as he plays the same motifs across the album, gracing the project with a sense of vulnerability and cohesion. Wisto’s vocals are pained and powerful as he embodies the narrator and his thoughts and feelings at every turn. The record breathes with its narrative—ambient instrumental sections serve as reflective moments and large, repeating crescendos swell to evoke the narrator’s overwhelming emotions. Every song connects, whether that be through a seamless transition, lyrical idea, or motif, creating a completely cohesive whole. This project wears its influences (Daniel Johnston, Mount Eerie, Cameron Winter, Silver Jews, and Black Country, New Road, to name a few) on its sleeve, but is not defined by them. The band’s sumptuous creativity is readily apparent and reveals copious amounts of ingenuity, as well as a truly singular vision that is the emotional throughline of No Beauty Can Move Me Now.
As Wisto told The Indy, the album centers around “a guy who's looking out the window of a mental hospital and sees God and the way the world works around him.” Moved by this idea, he wishes to leave, to see “the beauty in disconnecting” from the world. It is a harrowing theme, but one that reflects the ironies inherent in our lives. Once you’ve become acquainted with beauty, whether through spirituality, an experience, or another person, it can be thrilling, yet simultaneously dull the world around you. Would it be better to return to this distant reality of euphoria and disconnect from our own present? The narrator grapples with this question throughout the album.
The record opens with a transcendental and haunting track, “Moon,” which begins with sparse instrumentation soon followed by swelling crashes of instruments as the narrator cries for connection and understanding. “Fourth Floor” features a distinctive clarinet riff, a simple repetition of three descending notes that cycles in and out of the forefront of the track to perfectly interplay with the infectious vocal melody. During the events of this song, the narrator has his aforementioned spiritual encounter. Thoughts of disconnection with reality precede a panicked realization in standout track “Alone (Shorelines),” as the narrator reckons with his fear of running out of time with the people he is so attached to, with the love in his life that makes him feel at home.
The following tracks flesh out this positive force in the narrator’s life, personified as “The Raven,” “someone who loves and cares for you, a reason to stay,” as Wisto put it. One of the most fascinating tracks on the album is “Bird Song in E,” an instrumental that took full advantage of the project’s unique recording location. As the band jammed on an E chord, a microphone was walked through the halls of the church. “That's why it kind of sounds like it's moving between each one of us, because it really is,” remarked Bradley. Band member Peter Smith also used a field tape recorder to record various tape loops and build the atmosphere of the song, including the ringing of bells from the church’s roof and a poem written by Wisto. In the stripped back and elegant “Voice,” the narrator begins to tire of the “bird screaming in my ear,” trying to block out the people in his life.
The explosive end to the record ensues. “Love Song” sets up the finale with a repetition of the album’s title, which Wisto described as a “denial of things just because they’re not permanent or guaranteed.” The soft piano then continues into “Outro,” the gargantuan, seven-minute closer. The narrator talks to the two major characters he has been torn between across the record: the Raven, the representation of the love in his life, and Death, who draws him to disconnect with reality. The band erupts in a triumphant crescendo as the narrator is finally decisive in his future and tackles it head on in a beautiful culmination of sound and raw emotion. However, the most fascinating part of this song is its ambiguity. It is unclear whether the narrator is speaking to Death or the Raven throughout the track. “Like the water I will rise” suggests a determined march towards death, but “I could stay here I could try” points to an acceptance of life. In the final line of the album, the narrator makes his decision, saying “I must see you one last time;” however, Wisto emphasized in our interview that the listener must decide who this is addressed to: Death or the Raven. This grand presentation of euphoric instrumentation reaches dissolution beautifully, and the record concludes with a simple bass clarinet melody—the very same clarinet riff from “Fourth Floor.”
The interview with the band concluded with a discussion of their name, House Once Ours. To Wisto, this phrase fits the themes of the band’s work perfectly: ‘House Once Ours’ is a recognition of the ephemeral places where he grew up that no longer hold their meaning or purpose. No Beauty Can Move Me Now expresses the universal dread of representations of home turning to nothing but empty halls and lost connections. It’s terrifying to look back at the beauty you once had, the moments that are now just memories, the special times that make current times dull in comparison. However, this album inspires us to see an alternate path forward: to stay with the Ravens in our lives, and to continue to find new sources of love and connection, acknowledging that while they may not be permanent, they’re here now, and they’re special.
As Wisto prepares to move to Massachusetts soon, the band will begin touring and recording a second album. I hope you join me in supporting this incredible band’s future work, as well as that of the very aptly named Indy Cat Recording Co. Through music like this, we can connect with each other and ourselves, with the things that keep us going and those that keep us up at night. Through music like this, we can find hope and humanity in the universe, like ‘Ravens’ for the future of the world. Wisto beckons: continue to express yourself and be kind. Make the future beautiful.
Elliot Anderson is a junior in the College majoring in Biology and minoring in things named ‘Indy.’
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