SQUIRRELHOUSE

Main chronology:

• 2008: SPQR
• 2015: Friends

>> Leave a comment <<

Main Chronology

SPQR

1) Midnight Train; 2) Truckin'; 3) Knife in the Back; 4) Fours; 5) The Hunter; 6) The Moviegoer; 7) Nagasaki Shuffle; 8) The Searchers; 9) Burn With Me

Rough around the edges but full of promise and some great songs - a good entrance that could and should have been the first step towards something special.

My formative music-obsessive teenager years coincided with the rapid rise of internet as a tool for any bedroom and garage act to release their music to a wider audience, which was a fantastic thing. MySpace was the vital centre of any new and budding act, and every now and then you ended up discovering something really great: as a naive teenager I hoped and prayed for labels to pick up those demo acts I bumped into so that I could hear the acts blossom, only to be disappointed time and time again on the realisation that those demos were likely the only thing I’d ever hear from them. With the demise of MySpace, for many of the young hopefuls posting their music there all of it's gone now, save for some lucky few individuals who have held onto the files on their hard drives.

I discovered Squirrelhouse through MySpace obviously and I've gone into more detail about it in my review for Friends, a retrospective collection of demos for their tentative second album which was never fully realised. Those demos were what drew me to Squirrelhouse to begin with and got me excited for the future, but unfortunately I wasn't able to visit their past: despite my interest for the quietly released debut album SPQR, it was completely unattainable to someone across several big ponds without a credit card. SPQR remained as little more than a name in my memory until many, many, many years later, when my adult self finally bought what the teenager couldn’t. By that time Squirrelhouse had been quietly long buried and even though Friends had seen the light of day by that point, SPQR is the only full-fledged, “real” album that Squirrelhouse ever released - a feat many young bands of that era never reached, which is why it’s even more of a shame why it’s been buried in history.

The vision that SPQR builds is of a band full of talent but who are still learning the ropes. It's very of its time - post-Funeral, US indie had started to expand its sound and reach wider heights and Squirrelhouse are following up on that, traces of its peers all across its nine songs. Boy-girl vocals, anthem build-ups, heightened urgency and passion, and arrangements beyond the standard rock band set (mostly in form of the horn player who's part of the band's permanent fixture and really works wonders throughout the songs) are all familiar from other parts of the era, but that's fine. One, it's a great sound and it caters for my endless nostalgia but more importantly, Squirrelhouse never sound like they're imitating. It's the kind of debut where the influences are still showing up, but you can tell they're on their way for something unique - which Friends would then realise. If anything, on SPQR the band still aren't entirely certain what they want to be, and dabble across different paths. There's only nine songs and while there's a thin running thread through them, there's a good amount of variety within them, from the more no-nonsense rock of "The Searchers" and "Truckin'" to "Midnight Train", "Knife in the Back" and "Nagasaki Shuffle", which are most reminiscent of the energy, enthusiasm and shout-along hooks that this era is most associated with, and with a little extra polish could have become surefire festival audience pleasers. The most whiplash is brought on by the anxious, riff-heavy push of "The Hunter" and the slacker melodies of "The Moviegoer": while not among the album's best, Squirrelhouse are versatile enough to pull them off and "The Hunter" in particular gets pretty powerful by its furious finale.

The best cuts, though, are the ones that directly point the path forward. The stop-start groove of "Fours" and the increasingly intensifying "Burn With Me" show signs of the ideas that the band would go on to explore with the direction for their second album, with more fluid song structures, more emphasis on the rhythm section leading the way forward and the more intricate melodic arrangements. Both are full of promise, but still more importantly are also really great songs, rough spots and all. For a budding fan, they're the sort of things that whet your appetite for the future; for a band, they're the kinds of songs you put your everything into, to push you into the wider light.

I'm obviously viewing this through multiple layers of retrospective evaluation, and while I bang on about this band being a lost treasure of sorts, I don't think SPQR would have been quite enough on its own to secure that "legacy". It's a good record, with plenty of reasonably strong highlights and you already have the band's own, unique personality showing through. It's also a little rough, occasionally unfocused and the band haven't quite yet fully grasped their own strengths yet. It's exactly the sort of record you show around to your friends in hopes of building up some form of grassroots buzz, idealistically declaring these guys are going to be something to watch out for in the future, just imagine what they could do next. And then, well. If you're a sucker for that mid-late 00s indie sound and desperately need more, SPQR is a good shout - and thanks to the now-also-closed CDBaby and their automatic upload system, the songs continue to have some presence across modern services for those who search for them - but it's also a great example of a debut release which shines with, above all, promise. As probably the number one (and only? To this day, I’m not sure if anyone else remembers them even if they have a few hundred potentially historic listeners on Last.FM) fan of the band these days I heartily recommend it - but it's Friends that really demonstrates why I still think about Squirrelhouse and still wistfully sigh that the promises brought by SPQR never realised fully.

Physically: Thin gatefold with lyrics printed on the inside cover.

FRIENDS

1) Show You; 2) Jolene; 3) All That Shit; 4) Let the Right One In; 5) You Don't Know; 6) Friends; 7) Apocalypso; 8) Monster (Part 1); 9) Monster (Part 2)

A lost indie rock gem, buried in the annals of Myspace and finally resurrected in the modern age. I rejoiced. Others should too.

As already alluded to, among the countless freshly started bands using MySpace to communicate (or trying to do so) to wider audiences in the late 00s, Squirrelhouse were one of the few that really struck me. When I encountered them, they were already one album down and were now busy posting demos from their upcoming second album, and I loved every single one. They had a great thing going on: the guitars were bright, shimmering and swimming through the busy rhythm section, who themselves had a great thing going on with their combination of a loose indie rock dynamic and an undeniable backbone-tapping groove to the interplay between the drums and the bass. They even had a permanent French horn player on the lineup, layering each song with gorgeous horn arrangements which was a win for me back then too. I only had a chance to listen to debut album SPQR retrospectively so it wasn't until many years later that I realised this is exactly what that debut had foreshadowed, with the new songs taking the strongest, most identifiable elements of the band and developing further from the best parts of that debut. Squirrelhouse were still in line with the mid-00s idea of indie rock having a more expansive, epic sound, but the new songs still kept it up close and personal, threatening to reach bombastic heights the band could easily pull off if they wanted to, but keeping it as a tantalising hint in the background for most of the time.

Three songs in particular became repeat hits quickly. "Apocalypso" was the band's signature song of sorts in my mind, perfectly capturing that dry groove of theirs but throwing a fantastic curveball with its sudden switch to a plaintive, almost epic breakdown with that gorgeous French horn coming front and centre with its elegiac melody; it was a band realising they could master two very different tones and experimented by bringing them together, in a way that only made each one that much stronger.Meanwhile the two-part "Monster" was a stellar duo of songs which were completely different from one another but worked in unison perfectly, with the first part a moody drawl preceding the second part's injection of sudden energy into the otherwise decidedly cool and collected sound. I loved those songs to the point of hoping I'd find someone else who loved them as much as I did: when I made a post about them in my very first music blog, I found myself getting contacted by the band's lead writer Paavo Hanninen thanking me for it, which at the time felt special (the fact that he had a Finnish name despite his US upbringing was pretty cool too and made for some nice casual chatter in the emails). While SPQR was already out, truth to be told at the time I wasn't that interested about it (even if it had been easy to obtain); more than anything else, I was yearning for that second album to be released to hear more songs in line of what the band were teasing with their recent uploads.

The second album never came, for reasons I don't know why. The world forgot about Squirrelhouse, and maybe even Squirrelhouse themselves forgot about Squirrelhouse. I didn't - I had downloaded the demos and kept them around from one hard drive to the next, made them into a little EP and gave it a place in every iPod and MP3 library I had across the years.

One of my favourite moments of the universe showing its more magical side is when years later, as the naive teenager had turned into an office-crawling adult, shortly after I started using Bandcamp I typed in Squirrelhouse's name in the search on a whim. I found something I did not expect at all: Hanninen had uploaded the rest of the sessions for the lost second album there. Several years later, on a brand new music network, I discovered something I never thought I'd find, and stumbling onto Friends is genuinely some of the most excited I've been when it comes to discovering music.

And it's great. It's really great, even if you remove all the obvious nostalgic ties from the mix. The arrangements are excellent, keeping in line with the band's strengths and stand-out sound that the initial set of songs displayed. Brand new cuts like "Let the Right One In" and "Show You" are worthy of just as much love as the familiar songs I had listened to years. "Jolene" and "All That Shit", the other two familiar demos which always felt a little lesser compared to my favourites, have showed a great amount of longevity and endurance - the lazy disco beat and squelchy OTT synths of "Jolene" especially have become a stand-out moment of its own, bearing an off-beat jovial charm in contrast to the more firm and proper tone of the other songs. The old favourites are still just as great, and "Monster (Part 2)" even has a brand new finale now that gives it that one final extra oomph to close the record with, that I never knew it needed until now but which sounds absolutely integral to it. "Apocalypso" of course is still brilliant, its imaginary-stadium sized breakdowns now echoing with extra bittersweetness because it never had the chance to become as widely loved as it deserves to be. It's a lost classic, well among one of the 00s best songs in my books (and even if it was finally fully released in 2015, it would still make onto that list).

Squirrelhouse as a whole are a lost treasure. One of the sad facets about the infinite amount of new music the internet can provide is that not everyone gets the chance to get the recognition they deserve, especially so back in the MySpace days. In the digital-centric, streaming-friendly modern world you can easily cultivate a devoted fanbase, no matter how small, with your bedroom recordings and get them out on any major platform where they can be discovered by any; in the late 00s, you still needed the extra clout of a proper label backing you up to make the jump to to the more visible leagues. It's not something you think about that much until you discover an act who hit all the right boxes for you, but who you never see grow the audience you think they deserve. At the time of writing this I am the only person in Bandcamp who owns a copy of Friends and it's probably destined to live its life as a particularly obscure part of my library that I try to shove onto people where possible, and that's a little sad I guess. Friends is a great album in pretty much every regard: a characteristic style that sets it out from others of its genre, memorable instrumental performances and arrangements all across the board, Hanninen's vocals are full of quiet desperation that suit the sound, and the songs are excellent. The only complaint you could give it is that it's obviously a little rough around the edges, but at no point does it become a hindrance - you only wonder about the even greater heights these could reach with further polish. I don't think it'll ever get the retrospective recognition it deserves in my opinion but I am so glad it's finally out there, and most importantly, it's finally in in my music library.

Physically: n/a, digital only. Sadly.