Home Is Everywhere

Alpine “In the Wild”

I love songs like this, which circle through a set of motifs and melodies that never seems to fully overlap and harmonize. It’s like a form that never becomes entirely solid, a phantom tune you can sense but not grasp. There’s echoes of a lot of familiar things here – Sleater-Kinney circa Hot Rock, Young Marble Giants, Throwing Muses, Cat Power’s “He War,” the literal twin harmonies of School of Seven Bells – but it’s still a tricky thing to pin down. It’s not some copy, and there’s a high level of craft on this, and their entire debut record. It’s interesting stuff because on one level, it’s just very tuneful and accessible, but on the other, it asks your mind to fill in more gaps than you usually get from straightforward pop music.

Get it from the Alpine site.