HTRK - Venus in Leo

August 30, 2019 - Ghostly International

Continuing their relationship with Ghostly International, HTRK has released their latest album. The big anti-rock moodfest titled Venus in Leo has haunt to offer in every track. Heavily textured, highly repetitive, and unflinchingly melancholy with an album so innocuous it radiates blaring sterility. For reasons I won’t explicitly state, but to those who care to investigate, I’d like to, on the front end, offer up some alternative album titles, since this one seems only to capitalize on the occult buzzwords without having invested in the meaning of the language behind them: Shadow on Venus in Leo; Moon in Gemini; The Crab before the Twins; Gemini Cancer Cusp; I Looked Up My Horoscope Once.

‘Into the Drama’ is the opening track of Venus in Leo, and its title is also its refrain. “I fall into the drama, into the drama.” Mysterious lyricism, ambient tunneling space, and Jonnine Standish’s deadpan vocals repeating “into the drama,” until a powerful last stanza which beings, “You dance me to the edge of romance,” all creates a vector of bleakness harmonizing above to a greater bleakness than the bleakness of its parts.

‘Mentions’ follows up with the same tactics, but falls short of the poignancy which is the same as momentum for this album. Atmospherically effective though it is, the lyrical repetition does little more than contribute to the ambience. A single line could replace every other line in the song: “It’s not nearly physical enough,” which offers an often unspoken, or rather unsung tribulation. “You’re passing up on the real stuff/ It’s not nearly physical enough,” gives viscera to an unquenchable state of loneliness. Other lines Standish leans on like, “How you gonna fill unfillable/ How you gonna feel unfeelable,” only abstract what’s already been made acute.

‘Venus in Leo’ follows suit. The title track, with more musical structure than its predecessors suffers from poeticism that lilts rather than expresses. What begins as literary mystique,

“My mother always says

You don’t get that from me

You take it so personally,”

quickly devolves into a couching of false poetics. One is tempted over and over again to thematically fit the opening stanza (which holds itself together pretty well) with the power mantra in the song which is both haunting and moving, “Venus, don’t you make me wait/ ‘Cause my love is the higher one.”

This is done without too much difficulty, though the effort is met with a less promising emptiness—verse which does not reveal but obscures only to obscure. And when the song gets to the father stanza, the track reveals itself a yearning without premise. Thematically, one could offer that this is what’s at the heart of HTRK’s Venus in Leo, an indiscriminate and therefore unfocused dissatisfaction, an ennui that has no clear beginning. But it’s congruency with the title track seems incidental, and is only revealed when the audience’s distancing from the lyrics are analyzed. It works because it doesn’t work.

Leaving the paradox alone, we move on to, ‘You Know How to Make Me Happy.’ Leaning heavy on the production process, this song doesn’t offer much lyrically except to refer back to the astrological theme of the album title, “Sometimes you’er trippin’ with my air sign/ and you’re giving me fire;” and to insist from a point of audible melancholy that someone knows how to make the singer happy. Short and sweet, the mood carries along uninterrupted, which provides a pleasant passive listen and seems to bank on the listener being four songs in and along for the ride.

The writing devolves from here. ‘Dream Symbol,’ features lazy authorship accompanied by more of the same musicality: sustained dark ambience pinned up with synth plucks and well curated sparsity. The vocal timbre adds to the mood and only falls short by enunciating enough to be understood. The author can’t seem to locate herself within the structure of the lyrics. In crafting stanza after stanza in which a house with a closed door equates to an intimacy symbol, the voice shifts from outside the house asking to be let in, to unconvincing croons of, “I’m your body and soul,” and lacks the presence of mind to leave out a line like “This house is a dream symbol.”

Without paying attention, ‘Dream Symbol’ does what every other track does, creates a calming morose atmosphere with precision. Not a moment in the music breaks the spell of the space created with distant guitars, languid synths, and a hell of a lot of reverb. If only HTRK could either write lyrics without pretension or let the voices do what they’re already doing, mumble but harder thus completing the obscurity mystique they’ve so nearly perfected.

‘Hit ‘Em Wit Da Hee’ comes on next...

One wonders if the song is an homage to the cowboy craze that hit certain pockets of the internet and the top of the billboards in late 2018 and early 2019, and hasn’t quite died as of this writing. The reason is this: The end of the first and second line is “Hee.” The end of the fourth and fifth line is “Haa.” Fourteen of the thirty lines result in a stretched out “Hee-Haa,” a bastardized “Yeehaw!” Other lines include “Long Iced Tea, slurp me swiftly,” and “I thought no one noticed the way I roll, the way I roll this Dutch,” which is a refreshing bit of deadpan humor.

Having established that the instrumentation is of a singular focus and does not waver, one hones in on what does waver, which are the attempts and success of the lyrics to imbue the solemn romantic spaces with meaning. The next good line is planted in the last song ‘New Year’s Eve.’ It’s the sort of unswerving line that both plants one in the heart and room of the singer, who alludes to being sixteen, crooning, “Could I kiss you at midnight? And we could hang out some time?” The phrase repeats without losing effect.

When Venus in Leo is strong, grounding lyrics tie the airy vocals and spacious music together to poignancy. The album requires of a listener either an interminable patience for words or a complete unconcern for them. HTRK has crafted an album alternately generous and abstruse not for its complexity, but for its refusal to confront its subject matter which is too infrequently interrupted with willingness to confront its subject matter. How should we end this review? With the line from ‘New Year’s Eve,’ that could be about bukkake? Let’s try it out.

“As the last seconds fall before midnight, they're coming on me

    And I feel so high, it's so silly, my friends are around me.”

Yes. I think that’s it. ⛰️