POP MUSIC
Houston’s Narrow Head is making a lot of noise.
The lyrical passages in a Narrow Head song arrive at the front end of a tempest, quickly establishing a little bit of narrative or mood before they’re consumed by gusts of guitar.
“I just haven’t ever liked songs long with lyrics,” says Jacob Duarte, singer/songwriter/guitarist in the Houston band. “Going back, I was never the best at writing in school, coming up with 1,000-word essays. I guess I prefer to be brief and to the point. There’s a little mystery behind it, in a way.”
Not surprisingly when writing with the band, he says “the guitar is always the first step in our approach to anything. Write with a distorted guitar and build around it.”
The song “Stuttering Stanley” shows how that approach almost warps time. The song’s components give it the feel of a heavy 10-minute epic. In actuality, the song comes in a shade over three minutes.
Narrow Head’s approach yielded a bracing recording with its second album, “12th House Rock.” The band — Duarte with guitarists William Menjivar and Kora Puckett, drummer Carson Wilcox and bassist Ryan Chavez — has developed a sound that often gets likened to ’90s shoegaze. But Narrow Head operates with a jittery tension between the fragility of the lyrics and the stormy instrumentation that creates a space that doesn’t lend itself to easy comparison.
Not a bad next step for a follow-up to an album titled “Satisfaction.” That album title proved a bit of a misnomer. Narrow Head formed in 2013 and released “Satisfaction” three years later. The group started work on new songs shortly after its release, including “Stuttering Stanley,” which Duarte says benefited from “being one we’ve played for years, so it got pretty tight.”
But rather than rehashing “Satisfaction,” Narrow Head refined its sound and updated its lineup from the core trio of Duarte, Menjivar and Wilcox. The music grew more restless and spacious.
As evidenced by “Satisfaction,” titles don’t always necessarily indicate the songs attached to them. “Ponderosa Sun Club” takes its name from a nudist group in Indiana. “Really more of a nudist campsite, I think,” Duarte says. “I think it’s supposed to be family friendly.” “Hard to Swallow” was a deliberate tip to an album title by the legendary Port Arthur rap duo UGK.
If the titles exude a little bit of a random selection vibe, the lyrical themes and the band’s sounds are naturally symbiotic. Over the course of 13 songs, Narrow Head covers a range of insular thematic material about day-to-day struggles with communication and depression, stasis and sinking or some other labored movement. On “Ponderosa Sun Club,” Duarte sings, “another wasted day/I’ll float around/don’t bother.”
That cloudy approach to presenting thoughts is a natural representation of Duarte’s persona.
“I feel like I can struggle to say the simplest things,” he says. “I feel like I should say them, but there’s that feeling of not wanting to bother anyone. It’s weird talking about mental health directly. It’s just easier for me to write a song about something than to confront some issue or conflict.”
Words conveying isolation and desolation drift through between dramatic guitar parts that underscore the mood. “Evangeline Dream” is the most transparent of the songs, and not just because of the proper name in the title. Evangeline is the middle name of Duarte’s sister, who died seven years ago.
“That’s how I’ve coped with that,” he says. “Writing music. She inspires me every day — I feel the inspiration coming from her.”
From all the torment and tumult, a labored feeling of hope arises on the album. The instrumental dynamics project a feeling of catharsis, particularly in the ways they swell from near silence to cascades of distortion.
So the relative silence from Narrow Head since its release last month feels unnatural. This year should have been a busy one for the band. “12th House Rock” was issued by a popular and successful independent label in the Boston-based Run for Cover Records. An album release show and a year of tireless touring would have occurred but for a pandemic.
“I don’t know if we’ll ever tour on this album or just play these songs for the first time when we have a new record,” he says. “Nothing’s written in stone, so who knows what we’ll do, if we’ll just have to move on.”