Album Review: Hotel Lights - Get Your Hand in My Hand
The last time we had heard anything from Hotel Lights, it
seemed like the band’s principal force, Ben Folds Five’s drummer Darren Jessee,
had developed a sense of humor—he was writing big, upbeat, cinematic sounding
songs with titles like “Dave Sharky to The Dance Floor” and “All of My Asshole
Friends” on the group’s 2011 effort Girl
Graffiti.
A lot can change in five years, as Jessee returns with the
pensive and inwardly focused Get Your
Hand in My Hand, an effort that harkens back to the project’s humble, and
equally as pensive beginnings in 2004.
In listening to Get
Your Hand in My Hand, I realized how tough it is to classify Hotel Lights
into a genre. Is it ‘rock’ music? Is it ‘alternative’? There has always been a
hint of alt. country throughout a majority of the canon, but for the most part,
Jessee plays the role of the adult contemporary singer/songwriter, who just
happens to be performing under a band’s name rather than his own.
As a songwriter, Jessee knows a lot about somberness—it’s
something that he has known since he penned the chorus to his former group’s
biggest hit, “Brick,” and it’s something that he’s worn on his sleeve since
Hotel Light’s debut release—writing evocative, occasionally fragmented lyrics
that paint pictures of lonely, world weary individuals (some of whom may be
him), all searching for some kind of connection. The music may be less upbeat
and not on as grand of a scale as he had worked toward in the past, but as a
lyricist, on Get Your Hand in My Hand,
he is on point, and he sells it all with his earnest, fragile delivery.
“So I am always worried about my work,” Jessee confesses bluntly on the slinky opening track, “Lens Flair,” before he eases into album’s powerful and catchy first single, “Everything Hurts You Now,” the Beatle-esq “What A Love,” and the swooning “Ambulance Station.” But it’s on the album’s second half where Get Your Hand in My Hand really starts to shine by gathering more momentum (on the tumbling alt. country “Sky High” and the Ryan Adams-ish stomp of “For All Time”) and showing a lot more emotion (“You can always laugh, I can always cry,” he sings on the dramatic closing track “You Don’t Care.”)
Then there is the sweet “We’re Really Gonna Do It,” which is
the kind of song just begging to be played as the first dance at somebody’s
wedding reception.
For an album as reserved and somber as Get Your Hand in My Hand is throughout, there’s a real sense of
immediacy and urgency from this material—it’s as desperate to be heard as the
characters in Jessee’s songs are desperate to make that connection out there in
the cold world he’s created in his lyrics—and despite the long shadow it
thematically casts, the record itself is, as expected, immensely enjoyable,
making it really the first essential listen of 2016.
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