Object Hours

It’s past being a commonplace—it’s probably in The Simpsons, etc. —there’s the one dancer at a show who doesn’t care. They aren’t necessarily older than everyone else, but that’s what comes to mind. Whether they are high or not is made irrelevant by their dancing, which is both highly personal and in Haight tradition. The kind of eye contact that’s made about the dancer changes, with the age of the showgoers, from an entertained not quite derision that helps build a faith in the non-dancing ways one can love some music, to an entertained shame of ever having had anything close to derision in there, to envy.

This above is irrelevant or outmoded at plenty of shows, concerts, festivals. Where people are moving. From what I have seen, those are not the shows, concerts, festivals Object Hours have yet played. It’s still been the ones where most everyone is thinking “Oh my God. This is so good” and then entering free association. Either out-of-body (great), or like “That guitar sounds like a flute now, but not in a novel Peter Frampton talking / Big Country bagpipe kind of way, but in a gentle way. And now that flute sound makes me hear ‘Locomotive Breath’ in here. And now in this next song the guitar does sound like a bagpipe, so now what?” More likely zapped into tranq dream immobile gaze (great) than body waviness. They have had cool projections behind them, but not yet a whip dance.

It’s listening to their new LP “Solved By Walking” that makes me think this could be a group that transforms the audience I’m imposing on them into the kind where everybody is ecstatically moving. (Not just going to play the shows, concerts, festivals where it’s already happening, which of course Object Hours has every right to do.) This record sounds nothing like its most famous group, but you can listen and imagine The Dom, watch the whip dance in your head, free associate a while, move back to the whip dance (it’s like the “calm place” in EMDR), and then join in. This is way easy because you are in your own room.