SPREEKT U ENGELS? PROG AND POSTPUNK GO DUTCH WITH THE HOMESICK
“We aren’t actually good singers.” ELIAS ELGERSMA
“IF SOMEONE who studied linguistics read our lyrics, they’d say, ‘These could be the work of a 10-year-old,’” laughs Elias Elgersma, singer/guitarist with The Homesick. He’s not being falsely modest. When Elgersma and bandmate Jaap Van Der Velde (vocals/bass) wrote the group’s second album The Big Exercise, which lends new prog dimensions to their sinewy post-punk, the Dutch musicians left their translation dictionaries on the shelf. They used, instead, only the vocabulary they already knew as English-as-second-language speakers. “We didn’t want any ‘difficult’ or ‘cool’ words,” he clarifies. “We didn’t want to force ourselves to be anything we’re not.”
Refusing to hide their Dutch accents when they sing, The Homesick have no interest in sanding away their idiosyncrasies. They grew up in Dokkum (pop. 12,699), a remote, sleepy burg in Friesland best known for its annual heavy metal festival Dokk’Em Open Air. “It’s a heavy metal town,” sighs Elgersma. “No one understood the music we loved: post-punk, shoegaze…” Proud misfits, they tooled around Dokkum in their “Unimog”, a decommissioned military all-terrain vehicle, and experimented with making what Elgersma calls “wavy music”.
Elgersma created a minor buzz on SoundCloud in 2014 with the home-recorded hypnagogic electro-pop of his MOJOapproved Yuko Yuko project, while lengthy practice-space sessions with Van Der Velde and drummer Erik Woudwijk lay the groundwork for what would become The Homesick.
“We’d play these riffs over and over, for hours,” Elgersma remembers, “and we’d hit this almost transcendental state of mind. The sounds we were making were almost spiritual.”
Their 2017 debut, Youth Hunt, committed those sounds to tape. “Sub Pop Records heard it via Spotify,” says Elgersma, “and sent us a message: ‘Greetings. Great music.’” A recording contract followed this terse praise, but as the trio began work on what became The Big Exercise, they felt constrained by their “wavy music” paradigm. “We started to hear other possibilities, this encyclopaedic spectrum of music,” Elgersma says. Soon, they were robing the bare bones of their new songs with “clarinets and harpsichords, pianos all over and acoustic guitars everywhere”. The artfully arranged vocals, meanwhile, were inspired equally by The Beach Boys, and contemporary classical pioneers Meredith Monk and Joan La Barbara.
Elgersma is quick to point out that the group
“aren’t actually good singers”, and that The Big
Exercise’s baroque flourishes and proggy changes in time signature aren’t intended to showcase non-existent muso chops, but to “get the listener to play closer attention, to take a traditional song out of its context. We aren’t schooled, and sometimes we’re straining for a melody that’s too hard for us.”
Still, in embracing exotic new possibilities,
The Big Exercise marks a triumphant step into the unknown for The
Homesick. “Well,”
Elgersma laughs, drily, “we try our best, you know?”
Stevie Chick
The Big Exercise is out now on Sub Pop.