Bell House
Shy Boys
2018
Sometimes a little research goes a long way in appreciating an album. I've loved Bell House since it came out in '18 (it just barely got nudged out of the #1 Album slot for that year), but its charms have always been a bit ineffable. I couldn't quite pin down the reasons it affected me so.
I've returned pretty often to this album over the past couple years because it's a tight little pop album that sounds like the Beach Boys trying to as quiet as possible so they don't wake the neighbors. It lacks the grandeur of a typical music featuring multi-part harmonies; it holds its cards close to the chest. It's always seemed wistful and nostalgic in ways that I didn't quite understand.
But that couldn't be the case, because who could possibly be nostalgic for something that is so obviously dark? There are beautiful little songs here about living in your mom's basement, about abused dogs, about some unspeakable losses that keep you up at night. I loved it, but I didn't understand it.
It took me until writing about Bell House now to really try to grapple with that tension, and so I read some interviews with the band from 2018, especially this one from The Pitch, an independent Kansas City entertainment newsletter. Sure enough, the thesis was one of tough times and perseverance in the face of those challenges. Specifically, it spoke of the house some of the band members lived in for a while, basically a flop house where go-nowheres could smoke weed and give up on dreams.
Could one really be nostalgic for such a low point? I.e. can an absolutely beautiful pop gem be fashioned from such dark material? Apparently so. I ask myself this as I lay supine on my couch, diarrhea-stricken, which is apparently a symptom for COVID-19 now, and so maybe I'm dying. Will I make it out of this? Are there better times ahead? What beauty can I possibly find in such a situation?
Shy Boys show with Bell House that there is beauty to be found in every moment, even the bad ones. The challenges are what make life important. Could it be that I'll remember this morning, years in the future, shitting my brains out while "Something Sweet" plays over the speakers? Quite probably, in fact. Bell House is mysterious like that.
If this album sounds interesting, try this song: "Champion"
Stray Observations
- I have now officially written over 100 of these. I've celebrated by finally just embedding a goddamn song in this blog post. Hopefully this makes you, the reader, more likely to click on the song and try it out. Maybe that'll make up for the fact that I sometimes don't even write about the goddamn music as much as I should. Give me a pass today, okay? I either have coronavirus or ate some real bad Taco Bell.
- I tried to paint the experiences the band had prior to creating Bell House as retroactively optimistic, but it still made me pretty sad to hear about the band coming to grips with the fact that they will probably never make it big in the music industry. I'm not saying they shouldn't—they really should, this album is so fucking good—but I totally agree. I will never hear Shy Boys on the radio.
- I've heard this band's genre described as "landlocked surf rock," which might not be entirely accurate, but it's such a great phrase that I can't help but use it anyway.
- I love how much restraint these guys show. Something about it just hits me in exactly the right way. Like how in what is probably the album's best song, "Take the Doggie," how the music is so minimal, and then the vocals come in with one word—"Dropped..."—before taking another pause. It's the theory that the best poets are the most efficient with their words (kind of the opposite of what we do around here on PoYB).
- God, "Take the Doggie" is so fucking good. Still, it might not have even been the best song about a dog in the year 2018, a weird strong year for dog songs. It's up against boygenius' "Me and My Dog," and Ty Segall's "Fanny Dog."
- Back to the idea of small sounds on this album. That's probably the reason that Bell House ended up at #2 on PoYB's best albums list that year, behind Fucked Up's Dose Your Dreams. My love for maximalism is my tragic flaw. But I keep returning to Bell House because my love for its minimalism is so surprising, and so comforting.
- Shout out to Collin Rausch for being one of the very few fat boy lead singers in indie rock. There's probably something to say about the fact that you could make an argument for him being the frontman, but he's still relegated to the corners and far sides of all the promotional pictures of the band. I'm not sure I could give such an argument its justice, but I know it's out there somewhere.
- Speaking of being fat, I have an XL T-shirt of the Shy Boys, bought for me by Pam because I told her how much I like this album. I always get a little worried to wear it in public though, because I could see someone assuming that it's some sort of incel thing. There's a documentary called Shy Boys, not about incels, but a seemingly incel-adjacent group? I'm not sure. I'm not going to watch it.
- ALBUM TITLE: Alluded to above, "Bell House" is what they called the house three of the band members lived in together, on Bell St. in Kansas City.
- ALBUM COVER: I look at the psychedelic cover art not as an indication of how trippy the album is—it's not really—but more of an homage to the music that inspired them, the '60s/'70s acid-laden pop music that Shy Boys were able to scale back and create something new out of.
- CHART AND AWARDS: Seriously?
- As I would for any band whose album I love, I went back and checked out the only other Shy Boys LP, their 2014 self-titled debut. It's okay, and probably worth checking out if you like Bell House, but it's clear that in the intervening four years, this band leveled up.
- And as I would for any band that I love, I wonder how they are holding up under quarantine, and whether or not COVID is going to break this band for good. I hope not. I pray we get a Bell House 2 someday.
NEXT TIME: Bella Donna by Stevie Nicks
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