Pasadena indie rockers Interesting Hobbies Club have a knack for turning the volume up on everyday emotions and turning the ordinary into epic adventures of the heart, stories told through crushingly personal lyrics that mesh with wall-of-sound guitar melodies. Their third album (their first in four years) takes these instincts to their most thrilling extremes. Pulling from the anthemic proportions of glam rock heroes like David Bowie, the fuzz-and-feedback-laden production and sarcasm-sincerity line-toeing of 90s shoegaze and slacker rock, and storytelling structures from Greek mythology, Argonaut is the group’s most ambitious, heart-rending work yet in terms of both sonic scale and emotional depth. The four-piece is at their most all-over-the-place—and that’s exactly where they need to be.
Throughout Argonaut, it’s lead vocalist Julian Caspole’s emphatic tenor that grounds the group’s tailspin through sounds of emo, psych rock, glam rock, and slowcore, giving the album an overall feel of a long drive through the night with your favorite hidden-gem college radio station spinning out of the speakers. Psuedo-opener “Agoraphobia” smolders its way to brilliant, blazing background harmonies while Caspole unleashes a slew of dejected howls. Slinky keys, tinny hi-hats, and wall-of-sound guitars simmer and dissolve into each other like sugar in boiling water on “Eternal Patrol,” a forlorn, starry-eyed waltz. Caspole’s sorrowful swooning reaches its peaks on breakup ballads like “Four Years” and “20,000 Leagues out of My League,” which recall the greatest heartbreak bards of the college rock era—from Morrissey to Jeff Buckley to Elliott Smith.
Argonaut juxtaposes the anxious creep of slowcore ballads with rollicking shredders that pick up the pace. Caspole can go from dragging his broken heart along to sweeping it up into a thrilling dance with ease—as he does on standout “Hazel Eyes,” howling, “all you gotta do is let her go,” and momentarily tricking both himself and the audience into believing that’s as easily done as it is said. The members of Interesting Hobbies Club revel in slacker melodrama—an oxymoron until you hear Caspole sigh, “Wouldn’t you say that we’ve seen better days? We might not walk this one off,” on “Deja Vu,” before the track is capped off with a searing guitar solo. It’s easy to feel the actual weight of the world upon Caspole’s shoulders on the fittingly spacey and slow-burning “Atlas;” on this track, the weight of the world just happens to sound like tunneling drum hits and wailing, Ziggy Stardust-esque high notes cloaked in distortion.
As brilliant as Interesting Hobbies Club are when they’re taking massive swings, they’re equally striking in their sonically mellower moments. The quieter, more straightforward and reflective tracks that bookend Argonaut—especially the three-song folk suite that brings all the action to a close—reveal the band’s truly impressive range and coordination with one another. Whether an IHC track is a slow-burner or an explosion, it’s going to burn bright, and you won’t wanna look away.
