“If I Don’t Make It, I Love U” – Still House Plants

Album: If I Don’t Make It, I Love U

Artist: Still House Plants

Year: 2024

Genre: Post-Rock, Experimental Rock

Grade: B-

Still House Plants, a British post-rock trio consisting of singer Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach, electric guitarist Finlay Clark and drummer David Kennedy, have stumbled onto quite a unique sound: angular math rock rhythms + repetitive free jazz guitar chords + freewheeling neo-soul vocals. Their breakthrough album If I Don’t Make It, I Love U — which I discovered through glowing, effusive reviews on Pitchfork and The Guardian — doesn’t sound like anything else out there, but the experience felt unrewarding to me.

If anything, Still House Plants foregoes the monumental crescendos of post-rock forebears like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Swans and Mogwai for an intricate sound more reminiscent of the Albert Ayler Trio. Each musician does their own thing, which equals to something resembling spiritual unity: Kennedy’s drums collapse over themselves, Clark’s stream-of-consciousness guitar melodies derive beauty from pain, and Hickie-Kallenbach’s vocals … well, she’s no Erykah Badu, that’s for sure.

I understand that outré experimentation is the band’s raison d’être, but Hickie-Kallenbach’s style of singing is just not for me. Her indecipherable words, concealed in glossolalia, quickly become grating — freewailing rather than freewheeling. The best aspects of the album are entirely instrumental.

And even though Still House Plants’ overall sound is singular, every song sounds similar. The same stumbling rhythms, the same deconstructed riffs, the same tortured vocals — If I Don’t Make It, I Love U is a very difficult listen, and not just because of its avant-garde inclinations: the album isn’t constructed in an enjoyable manner. The best songs are the first and the last, but the center cannot hold. It’s the rare experimental rock record that isn’t good or bad; just mediocre.

NOTES & CHORDS

• The first few seconds of opener “M M M” are glorious post-rock. Clark has a very pleasing guitar tone, and Kennedy’s drumming is very rhythmic.

• I enjoy closer “More More Faster” for the distorted guitars and Hickie-Kallenbach’s earnest singing. The rest of the album sounds like she’s vocalizing in weird ways just for the sake of doing so. This song is purposeful, with conviction.

• “More Boy” is the pinnacle, or nadir, of Hickie-Kallenbach’s strangeness, particularly in the song’s second half, in which she’s going on about an “angel” (I think) but can’t seem to spit it out.

• Despite my review, I’m glad that art rock is alive and well — and thriving, in fact — in Great Britain. Still House Plants are no Black Midi or Black Country, New Road, but it’s always nice when experimental artists get exposure.

• What I’m looking for next time: more variation in the arrangements. I know Still House Plants has somewhat limited themselves with their trio formation, but the sonics of each song all traverse the same territory. Even the range of notes seems limited: low register guitar, snare drums without reverb, contralto vocals.

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