Welcome to the BSH Saturday Music Club! Each Saturday we will be featuring one album that a Broad Street Hockey writer has chosen and given the rest of the staff to listen to and write their thoughts. This week, Maddie Campbell has chosen the album Absent Sounds, the third full-length release from Californian indie rock band From Indian Lakes.
It’s hard to imagine that this band (along with frontman Joey Vannucchi’s releases under the Joe Vann moniker) has been part of my life’s soundtrack, if you will, for the better part of ten years, but that’s exactly the truth. And with a whole host of mainstays in that catalog, perhaps the album most regularly and most completely in my rotation is their third full length Absent Sounds. It was unlike anything I’ve ever heard before, and it holds up for me just as well as it did around the time of its release back in 2014.
There’s a lot that’s striking about this record– the variance in texture, the way it oscillates between tender, introspective, and sharp-edged and gritty. The power in the imagery. The vocals which are so deeply emotive and precise. The strong balance struck between acoustic elements and electronic. Layering works well, and the album is adept at these sort of crescendos – the ebbs of “Label This Love,” the raw delivery of the bridge into the punchy final chorus – but perhaps the album is most affective when it is allowed to lay bare (here, I’m thinking of the moments in “Awful Things” when the instrumentation drops, but for the acoustic guitar, and we’re left with Vannucchi’s voice coming through as though echoing in a vacant, cavernous room).
In themes, we grapple with identity, evolution in the face of great emotional loss. But there is no finger pointing, no one-sided assigning of blame, simply moments to say “here I am, this is how I am experiencing this moment, and is what I am feeling the same as what you are feeling?” Touching in their vulnerability, the emotionality of these moments is underscored by the fact that an answer never does come. The feeling of solitude reified.
“Who do you want to be now that they’re gone?” we’re asked on the closing “Fog,” as we near the horizon and scramble to arrive at our moment of insight, of closure. But perhaps there’s none to be found here. Perhaps it’s enough to sit in the in-betweenness with the not knowing. Perhaps it’s enough to be alone after all.
-Maddie
Absent Sounds by From Indian Lakes
Ryan Q.: This is my first time hearing this record, and I think Joey Vannucchi’s story made my experience that much more memorable. Growing up without electricity in the surrounding wilderness of Yosemite National Park, From Indian Lakes’ frontman sure didn’t fall short of capturing a big, monstrous (and sometimes delicately beautiful) sound as vast as the place he once called home.
I heard subtle similarities to several of my favorite alternative artists numerous times throughout my playthrough of the record. Whether it was Vannucchi’s Brandon Boyd-esque vocals, the twinkling guitars akin to Young the Giant, or the pinches of Radiohead (who Vannucchi openly classifies as a musical influence) sprinkled throughout the album, Absent Sounds produced noises and feelings I was acutely familiar with, even though this was my first time actually listening to any of the band’s work.
Standouts from my first listen were the catchy “Breathe, Desperately,” the stripped-back “Am I Alive,” and “Fog,” which is easily the track I’ve returned to most often after the initial playthrough.
Joe D.: I’d never heard of From Indian Lakes before, but listening to Absent Sounds brought me back to my college dorm room all the same–complete with blue twinkle lights, fiber-optic light fixture, and the iTunes visualizer. I may’ve graduated before this album was even released, but the influences are there: the mournful lyricism and vocals give Death Cab for Cutie, and the technical precision reminds me of Foals and The Dodos–the latter of which Joey Vannucchi cites as an influence, which I’m here for considering how much I love their album Visiter.
Absent Sounds fits right in with its contemporaries, too. The Antlers (Undersea) and Port St. Willow (Holiday) were both dialing up the shimmering reverb to create stunning atmospheres and icy textures, though with less of an anthemic tilt than From Indian Lakes. That belt-along aspect is where Absent Sounds shines for me: it nods to its predecessors and builds a hermetic world all its own, then creates space to breathe and find some semblance of peace, whether by yourself or shouting along with your friends.
Introductions are crucial for me, and opener “Come In This Light” doesn’t miss. It starts with a single piano chord looped back over itself again and again, building an ambient canvas for the rest of the song to take shape on, and the lyrics tell you exactly what to expect from the rest of the album: “You don’t know what it’s like to lose.” By the end of the album, you do.
Thomas: Like others, this is my first time listening through this album and my initial impression was fixated on how texture-forward Absent Sounds was. The layering effect that stays fairly consistent throughout the album but is very present on tracks like “Ghost” and “Breathe, Desperately” just create like a neat little net for the ears – to try really hard to create some music blogger-esque analogy that doesn’t make any realistic sense.
This entire album really struck me as something I would be desperately into during high school. I was a big skinny jean-wearing, cardigan-ass, swoopy-hair kid during those days with affinities for bands like Wye Oak, Manchester Orchestra, and would solemnly walk while listening to some Iron & Wine. That is a phase that I lost within months but Absent Sounds made me remember it like it wasn’t over a decade ago.
Other than that connection, it was just an overall pleasant album to listen to. Nothing that stretched the ear too much, had really interesting and loose-feeling drums to match with some angular guitar riffs, piercing through some finger-plucked guitar (like on “Runner” for instance). I might return to this album when I really want to just have something easy on the ears.
Matt: I, too, was unfamiliar with From Indian Lakes (that means it’s a good pick, Maddie!). I listened to this album a few times this week in the background of my daily life—driving to the beach with talky passengers, making breakfast for the baby, trying to sign Shohei Ohtani to the Phillies in MLB The Show 23, running in the sprinkler. And it didn’t stick with me any of those first few times. It somehow stayed somewhere below my ears and out of my memory until I put on some headphones and took it for a 6 a.m. walk with the stroller. As the soundtrack for the dewy suburban morning, an overcast day with a slow, slow sunrise filled with gentle head nods and ‘good mornings’ to coffee-handed commuters in their driveways and groggy dog walkers being pulled by toy breeds, the exact ups and downs, nuances, and swells of Absent Sounds finally sounded right.
The odd mix of acoustics and electronic elements were truly accentuated when pumped directly into my brain with no other distracting sounds. The haunting loneliness of lines like “I used to be you and I can’t go back” or “We breathe so desperately as if it’s the only thing we need/And we don’t care if it’s not breathing honestly/We’re burning our lungs with it and we don’t care at all” felt right at home. The cocktail of all these elements conjured up some latter day Bon Iver, some early-era Coldplay, some of the pop-punk artists of the aughts/teens that I’m mostly too old to have been the target audience for. Maybe it’s the expanse of the album’s sound, almost searching for nooks and crannies to fill or maybe it’s just the layered textures that came alive with more attention.
Ultimately, I don’t know if this is an album that will go into rotation for me. I definitely enjoyed it even though it’s not quite in my wheelhouse—once I hit 30 it became harder and harder for something new to truly crack my shell despite the intense and seeking ways in which I would chug new and new-to-me music in the two decades prior. But I do think that in those right circumstances it’ll be a feeling I’ll remember and look to return to, whether it’s by plugging in something akin to From Indian Lakes or simply the band itself. Like all things at this point in my life, whether or not it sticks around remains to be seen.
Jacob: This album really took me back to a time in my life where I didn’t have anything like streaming services to expose me to new music. But my family did have SiriusXM, and I used to frequent a bunch of different Indie and Alt Rock channels that introduced me to bands like City in Colour and Foster the People. From Indian Lakes isn’t exactly like either of those groups, but listening to Absent Sounds conjured up some of the same feelings inside of me.
The spacey, intimate guitar notes that are used throughout are just so easy to listen to, and in fact, the musicianship is fantastic from front to back. Songs like “Runner” use some really minimalistic drum patterns that are super interesting and are very easy to listen to. The solo at the end of the outro “Fog” hits heavy, and is a really memorable moment to cap everything off.
I really enjoyed this album. I appreciate frontman Joe Vannucchi’s commitment to instrumentation and you can hear throughout the album that he has a very good ear for how things should sound on every song . He creates various different soundscapes for every track, and I really couldn’t find any that I could say I “disliked”. The lyrics are very emotive, and I could make a laundry list of quotables, but I think “And I’m holding out my hand to you/ But you slip right through my fingers” is something that kinda sums up the kind of emotion this album stirs up.
Feel free to listen to the album and put your thoughts down in the comments!
