Music review: Sound and loss in Outerhope's 'No End in Sight'

It was maybe about three years ago when I first heard Outerhope. They made a huge difference in a gig that was dominated by bands that were, to this then-untrained ear, uniformly not quiet. Micaela and Michael Benedicto, siblings of former debater and academic Bobby Benedicto, were doing keyboards and guitar. Then as now, Outerhope played songs that combined simple harmonies with lyrics that seemed to serve as a poetic response to Proust's “Remembrance of Things Past.”

Most of their songs are indeed in this reflective mode. Their second album “A Day for the Absent” has produced such songs as "Twenty Years from Now" and "Lost in Numbers," which was one of their first songs that stuck in my mind. That 2009 album was so popular that the first pressing ran out. A second edition, now under the Number Line label, has been released in time for their performances at the New York and San Francisco Popfests. Their appearance at the NY Popfest has been well received, with Ross Bernhardt of Charged.FM noting, “It's hard to get a crowd completely transfixed, but that's exactly what they were as the duo played their set.” Beverley Brian of the site mtviggy.com likened their sound to “kind of soft breeze that smells nice, like the outdoors.” If indeed the aim is to think about things past, the next logical step may be to reflect this in the sound. While their past albums were more inspired by the alternative pop of the day, their new EP “No End in Sight” (Number Line) reminds me of the pop of my childhood. The opening track, "Lost Year," is a song that got me excited when I first heard it about a month ago. A ballad for guitar and strings, the melody is one of the best in their repertoire so far. The second and third songs, "No End in Sight" and "Hear the Days Go" evoke more than anything else the New Wave sound, with programmed drums and synth sound reminiscent of, say, New Order's work. The final song, "Pale as the Day," is closer in spirit to their earlier work, but like all the songs here relies on '80s-style vocals--the effect of which is to turn their poetry into dream-speech. There may be something more in this EP than merely a new sound. While the poignancy and rawness of their earlier work have always appealed to listeners, this new work slips in thoughts that subtly subvert our expectations. "Things we've known are fading out/Turn around from the things we figured out," they sing at the end of their EP. But if there is a place where this subversion starts, it is in “Lost Year.” It turns out to be the most self-reflexive song in their repertoire once one considers their lyrics: “We wrote tales telling them backwards/Having the endings meet where they both started...” Perhaps this could be a reflection on Outerhope's corpus before this EP. It is an act of telling tales backward, “hoping to find our lost year.” What Outerhope asks us to do, then, is to reflect upon the act of remembering. Augustine suggested in his “Confessions” that time was a “stretching of the soul,” approximating eternity, which is always a present, with our attempts to bring the past and the future into our present consciousness. But it is a stretching that is imperfect. We forget. We remember bits. And our memories are at times tinged with nostalgia, often obscuring the banality of what may have really happened, whatever it was. Nevertheless, we remember, but we must ask at times how we remember and why. It is to the band's credit that they are beginning to ask these questions in a musical context. While I suppose the new aesthetic of “No End in Sight” would be a challenge for some of their long-time listeners, I find this record to be as thoughtful, if not more, than their past work. In their self-reflexive moment, Outerhope's latest work evokes a healthy remembering of a sound from their childhoods. If, as French philosopher Paul Ricoeur suggests in his last major work “Memory, History, Forgetting,” the act of a healthy remembering involves a healthy forgetting, then Outerhope's record enables the process by making us ask whether our lost years should remain lost, for a reason. — KG, GMA News Outerhope's new EP is available for download, for free, from Number Line Records (http://numberlinerecords.com)