Black And Lonely And Everlasting

Hospitality “I Miss Your Bones”

I closely associate the first Hospitality record with the dead of winter, and so it’s not a surprise that their second album suits that time just as well. Trouble is a lot more minimalist and chilly than the debut – about half the songs sound like they’ve scraped out a lot of the arrangement with a scalpel, and even a relatively robust track like “I Miss Your Bones” has little embellishment beyond the sound of a few core instruments and a lot of implied negative space. There’s a vague anxiety in this music – it comes out most obviously in these occasional manic bursts of melody, but it’s mostly there in the empty air. It’s an uncertain feeling that isn’t specific, so it just ends up coming out sounding like an absence.

Buy it from Merge Records.