Memoryhouse The Slideshow Effect

Just last September, Memoryhouse re-released The Years EP through Sub Pop, and it was as dream pop as dream pop can get. Its shorter format worked in its favor and created a nostalgic, absorbing space that the listener finished exploring right as the record ended. On The Slideshow Effect, Memoryhouse strips away the full production, lets the vocals rise to the front, and lets their songs do the talking. The bold choice exposes their weaknesses, but Memoryhouse still has plenty to be proud of.

The opener, Little Expressionless Animals is somewhat of a misnomer. Denise Nouvion multi-tracks her voice while Evan Abeele keeps the musical accompaniment to a minimum, creating genuine, haunting mystery when she sings “everybody knows that you are dead” and the strings deliberately, purposefully creep into the mix; the song is anything but expressionless. In a way that so many other dreamy bedroom bands have failed to do, Memoryhouse seems to immediately have something tangible to say, and they know how to say it.  In The Kids Were Wrong, they take the tempo up bring an electric guitar into the composition to immediately suggest that in addition to being emotionally articulate, they are also versatile.

Unfortunately, the latter suggestion more closely resembles a broken promise, as the next 8 songs move at the same tempo as Little Expressionless Animals, and it becomes increasingly clear that Nouvion is just confident enough to put her voice firmly in the mix but far from confident enough to really use it; she sings with the same cadence and with the same look-twice, disguised monotone throughout the album. Nouvion certainly has more power than she displays here, and she may even be quite a good singer, but the lack of confidence magnifies every mishap.

More confident, fortunately, is Abeele, who plays a variety of instruments throughout the album and  brings something new to each song. Be it the dual-guitar interplay on highlight Heirloom, the bass+percussion combo in Walk With Me, or the sparse, effective piano on Kinds of Light, Abeele knows what instrument to use to get the desired feeling that the often-times moving lyrics would evoke if Nouvion had more confidence in her ability to sing them. From the coziness sparked in Bonfire to the feeling that the world revolves around you in the aforementioned, alluring Walk With Me, there is a clear interest in conveying emotion. Many of these seem to be inspired by more effective Mazzy Star songs—a keen ear can hear Five String Serenade and So Tonight That I Might See, but Fade Into You, Flowers In December, and Halah are all clearly here. But Abeele does enough with drums and guitar mini-solos to let us overlook that fact. It’s just nice to have an effective bridge in dream pop now, isn’t it? And Memoryhouse’s always are.

Like documentarians do when utilizing the slideshow effect (where the camera continuously pans across a series of still images that fill the screen), this album, too is able to make you feel like you are constantly progressing even as you linger on one moment. The goal here is to edge toward an idyllic nostalgia by taking you through all the feelings that you encounter on the way, and while Memoryhouse may ride the brake on the way, you get to enjoy the scenery. The swirling synthesizers on The Years EP were replaced by well-written, intricate instrumentation on The Slideshow Effect, and it is precisely this change that allows the LP to work over 43 minutes while so many other albums that opt for full sounds and layered instruments lose their appeal after a couple spins. When Memoryhouse tells us “you’re not alone” repeatedly, as they do on Pale Fire, or invites us to “get cold together” on Bonfire, we may have been more convinced by Hope Sandoval and David Roback. But it has been quite a while since they spoke to us, and we have certainly been much less convinced, too.