Houndstooth is a five-piece rock and roll band, and they’ll break your heart and make you feel alive all at once. Their songs are basically electric folk songs in the way they talk about everyday sweetness and desolation in a manner that’s as singular and idiosyncratic as the singer of the song (in this case, the inimitable Katie Bernstein.) And this while speaking to a common uncanny experience of the world that we can all identify as the stuff of true life. The presentation, of course, is decidedly informed by the grand recent history of rock acts, but you might instead think about a William Eggleston photograph or an Alice Munro story, warm kodachrome and the narrative of bittersweet true life.
Houndstooth began in 2010 when Katie Bernstein and John Gnorski started writing songs together. A few months of work and a handful of lo-fi demos later, the two recruited their favorite local musicians to bring it all to life. The result is an elusive amalgam of familiar sounds – Verlaine-esque guitars, Nuggets-era organ, heavy melodic bass, and Kenny Buttery-like drums with Bernstein’s voice giving everything an elegiac and hopeful gleam.
Their debut LP, “Ride Out The Dark,” is a collection of songs that came out of the universally tumultuous year of 2012, and they speak to the light at the end of the tunnel we all made it through. Put the record on your turntable and sit with it for a while; it’s the kind of album that makes you homesick for an un-nameable place and puts you in its own sort of darkness on the edge of town where things are raw and alive and unchained, watching the road pass through a glass-bottomed sedan on a highway dark with spring rain.