Attic Abasement
Dream News
Reviewed by: Max Miller
I still remember the day I first heard about Attic Abasement, the Rochester, NY-based songwriting project of Mike Rheinheimer. It was about as close as the underground rock community gets to Beyoncé releasing a surprise album. It was the summer of 2014, and although Attic Abasement’s Dancing Is Depressing had been released in April of 2010, seemingly everyone on my Twitter feed had just discovered the album as if it had just dropped out of the blue. To be honest, I couldn’t find the charm behind the record as readily as everyone else. Dancing Is Depressing mainly consists of lo-fi, minimalist acoustic songs, delivered in Rheinheimer’s David Berman-esque drone. It’s a fine album, but I’d heard plenty like it before and have heard many like it since. However, Attic Abasement had more recently released a split 12” with the band Nod, on which the lineup was expanded to a four-piece band.
The seven songs on this split blew me away. Rheinheimer had seriously stepped up his game lyrics-wise, and began to explore the cracked upper regions of his singing voice. The more fleshed-out accompaniment also helped extricate the band from the constraints of self-imposed low fidelity. I was excited to hear that Attic Abasement would be releasing their next full-length, Dream News, on Father/Daughter Records.
The band is a three-piece now, minus one D. DeWispelaere, which means Dream News is a little shorter on guitar leads than the split, but, otherwise, the gauntlet thrown down by songs like “Will This Give Me Cancer Or Not” and “The Funeral Song” is firmly matched. Opener “Guarantee Jesus” begins with a tequila sunrise of lazily-strummed chords that gives way to a steadily-rising vocal line that finds Rheinheimer moving from a baritone drawl to a surprising, sustained high note. This gives way to the ambling “Statuesque Mess,” on which Rheinheimer sings of “the way the cemetery trees feed off the bodies” and “small-talk between the wars.”
Many songs on Dream News, like “Show Up to Leave” and “Neon Trim” feature twangy, lightly-distorted guitar lines and bassist Keith Parkins’ urgent basslines, reminiscent of a Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain-era Pavement. Drummer Joe Parker often keeps it in the pocket, so to speak, but particularly shines through on “So Far,” where his chugging kick drum gives the tune a folksy, train-kept-a-rollin’ vibe. The album’s centerpiece is a brief piano-driven instrumental called “Abigail Folger,” which harkens back to Attic Abasement’s days as a considerably more lo-fi endeavor, and serves as a nice companion to the mournful, organ-driven closer “News Continues.”
The real focal point of this project, though, is Rheinheimer’s lyrics. But the tricky thing about Dream News is that he’s not quite as blunt a lyricist as, say, Car Seat Headrest’s Will Toledo or even his ‘90s forefathers like David Berman or Bill Callahan. He’s not as big on one-liners or blatantly profound statements, choosing instead to go for harder-to-parse observations, like “Most of what you know is not, now that all you know’s enough” on “Inverted Youth.”
This willful obfuscation may prevent Attic Abasement from crossing over beyond the segment of the music-loving population which takes pride in delving into sometimes-inscrutable lyrics. But then again, this same audience catapulted Rheinheimer from obscurity to a Bandcamp hero signed to an influential independent label. Dream News is still not the perfect Attic Abasement statement, but it gives me hope that bigger and bigger things are coming from this fine group of musicians.
Rating: Bad-Ass
