By Kathryn Pinto
If your day doesn’t usually involve things like “rolling up a wall” (painting a white wall back to white with an extension roller), as mine did recently, you could miss the sweetness and complexity of Poplar Avenue, the excellent debut album from Escalator Hill. It is the kind of a record that doesn’t reveal itself all at once and is not what it seems, or even what it announces itself to be. Instead it is an ensemble piece, a conversation among confidants, and the promise of a second act.
At first blush Escalator Hill is led by the powerful vocals of Antony Benedetti, a character actor of a voice that listeners might love for its peculiarity the way they love Tom Waits and Jeff Mangum, or that on the other hand, you just might not care for at all. But if you stay with the record a couple of songs in, and over repeat listens, these vocals modulate, and violin, guitar and brass in turn step forward. Benedetti’s vocals unfold to reveal sweetness, vulnerability, and a quiet strength that strives toward the hope of redemption.
Escalator Hill approaches music making with a classical or even orchestral sensibility toward arrangements, but expresses that sensibility through their native tongue of country-tinged roots rock n roll. To call the Dave Newton-produced Poplar Avenue Americana is to categorize it too easily and too quickly. What happens is that the voices of different instruments emerge as characters in conversation in a way that I don’t hear very often in indie rock.
In songs like “Jupiter” Benedetti’s vocals charge in over the intro of rhythm guitar and cello, saloon doors swinging in his wake, but he gives way to more vulnerable and plaintive singing that plays against Ryan Ross' clear, bright trumpet. Again on “Long Way Down” you hear the guitarist’s guitar of Andrew Schneider and then Nancy Kuo’s violin answers back with strength and precision in bittersweet dialogue with Benedetti’s voice.
“Get Up” opens the album “Time to get home and uncover all those dreams that you let lie/Can't help but wonder how they got left for so long…” and goes on to encourage the listener to march on out there and live some of those fading dreams. Maybe there are a lot of other people in Los Angeles who are broke and lonely and hoping to do things better in the next chapter. The lyrics resonate with intimations of second acts and gaining the perspective of being a little bit older. On “When” the bright trumpet line plays like a second harmonizing line to the vocals as he talks to the violin line. “…When the lights grow dim, I'm looking forward to nothing and I'm thinking of giving in/ …maybe that's when you'll call me.”
Like rolling up a wall, eyes following roller up, up and up in a tempo of rotation exactly in time to the most beautiful-sad violin line, the outstanding Poplar Avenue, a tightly arranged and beautifully played album, reveals itself in the moment you let go.
Escalator Hill is playing a Free Tuesday night residency at the Central SAPC during the month of October. The Central SAPC, 1348 14th St., Santa Monica, CA 90404, FREE/8pm/21+
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