Still House Plants - If I don't make it, I love u (2024)

Genuinely smart art school rock is hard to come by, but Still House Plants make it sound easy, welding subtly R&B-inflected vocals to fractured, free jazz-cum-post rock drums and Shellac-strength axe acrobatics on their incredible third album. Genius, just a bit.

There was a moment during post-rock's evolution when it felt as if the jazz influence that had been simmering in the background since the Talk Talk days was about to bubble over. Tortoise were making firmer connections with Chicago's pantheon of jazz greats, and bands like Boston's Karate were using a music school education to fuel songs that felt kaleidoscopic and open-minded. But as the '90s drew to a close, the genre tightened up and seemed to wander one of two ways: overbearing darkness or luxury car adverts. Still House Plants formed in 2015 at the Glasgow School of Art, and since then have been painstakingly figuring out how to reconcile their web of influences. The backbone is spiky-but-technical US basement rock like Slint or Shellac, but Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach's spine-tinglingly soulful vocals immediately skew the energy, and the band's interest in electronic recording techniques puts them more in line with day zero post-rockers Bark Psychosis.

They lean into all these contradictions on 'If I don't make it, I love u', infusing their spidery rhythms and angular guitars with illusory production techniques that don't upset the mood, letting the powerful vocals swirl around front of house. Much has been made of the trio's love of UKG, and while that's a potentially lazy reference point, Hickie-Kallenbach's delivery is unmistakably indebted to club music. So much so that the fusion is brilliantly unsettling at first; on 'M M M', she loops late night memories ("I just want my friends to get in!") while David Kennedy thuds jerky rhythms and Finlay Clark phases wonky strums. Their process is confidently unique, slipping from cohesion into freeform chaos - the vocal hooks remain, but Kennedy and Clark sound as if they're remixing themselves on the fly: the drums splay into fragments and the guitar is layered into tremolo'd wails.

It's easy music to like, the kind of gear that's ambitious without being lofty. You can spot the references, but Still House Plants don't cover up their inspirations. On 'Sticky', Hickie-Kallenbach drops hardcore-soused diva cries over her bandmates' erratic call-and-response flurries, '3scr3w3' is a deliciously pitch-fucked racket, and on 'Headlight' they sidechain their snare to cut through Clark's riffs. It's like, imagine a classic, all-timer band, one of the greats, full of ambition, and suss, but seemingly with little interest in making concessions, to anything. Not many of those, right?

Finlay Clark / guitar
Jess Hickie-Kallenbach / vocals
David Kennedy / drums

Tracklist:
1.01 - Still House Plants - M M M (5:46)
1.02 - Still House Plants - Pant (2:30)
1.03 - Still House Plants - Sticky (4:20)
1.04 - Still House Plants - MORE BOY (3:47)
1.05 - Still House Plants - Probably (3:13)
1.06 - Still House Plants - 3scr3w3 (3:48)
1.07 - Still House Plants - Silver grit passes thru my teeth (5:22)
1.08 - Still House Plants - Headlight (3:42)
1.09 - Still House Plants - no sleep deep risk (4:14)
1.10 - Still House Plants - Pushed (3:09)
1.11 - Still House Plants - More More Faster (6:18)