Hollands is so good they're hard to describe. Words will have to take the same liberties as the songs. In short, there's the sound of long summer evenings, when the light stretches out over through the late sun. You're saddled up to a view you like, a small river, a back-road you know. And laid into the winding of the day you slap a song into the mix: you know this -- something that can define a season, or stake a feeling you push out into the months. Say to me, ask me, 'what is a small album that can take up a few core months of my life, when I'm feeling charmed and sad?' Hollands, I'll say.

 

Take a song like "Air Conditioned Heart." What starts off as the long riff of an electric rhythm line melts into the hard swaying of a "heart beating so fast." You can sense the rich epic of a big strike. Kansas, tandem bike, sandwiches..."just suck my drenched lips," it goes. Between the heavy drums and the rumming violins, there is a bursting punch. It rides out with strong beats and a slumping drum that builds into the tom-chop sluice of a Sargent Pepper bust out. There is haywire and American force. Here's what I want to tell you: during the first guitar solo, it sounds like a panicked, rich, red cutting. This is music sexy enough to remember, and big enough to fall down with. There's an old-fashioned, gigantic sound that bursts through a few different decades of soulful jams. If Pink Floyd celebrated a touch more irony -- if they were a touch less serious -- you could say, 'blow up faster and scratch a sharp pop of strings, forwarded to a Top-40 arc.' This is the regular, easy, buzzed realm of Hollands. 

 

They're different live, in the sense that when they play live one can feel the comic leakage dousing up a hard chill. Here's what I mean by that: a body moves, a swelling clears the throat, and a hundred tiny flicks light up the scruff of the neck. Something here is expanding. During "Jackie," somewhere after the ' matriarch thighs ' and 'sentimental image' there's a long, hooking, electric slice. It eats into the night. These guys can carve up a night with a pinch of inflated noise -- they can jam when they're playing by the rules. They can blow up in nice tonic when you think they're about to lose it. 

 

Let me be straight up in my comparisons. There is a fired, worn up room they can play that picks out the fun crunch of new style. Behind Jeff Tweedy is Jeff Buckley. These are comparisons that can hold up; these are the songs that can animate the full ground of one's life. These are songs you can tell stories about, or songs that lend themselves to the times of your life that make good stories. Hollands is professional, sleek, and loud. They will impress a date. They will power a weeknight when you a share a table with a friend. In "Jackie," the regulated parking of the rhythm blasts up into the edge of "sentimental image" and everything falls apart. There's a waa-waa peddle grind that flunks winging into the verse. When they say, "Glory to God," you fear less the actual homage up to the purple Brooklyn winter skyline and instead lean back and sip the air. Lean back. Roll your neck. Neil Young catches up to the edges of the amplified fuzz. This is 'Rust Never Sleeps' meets the softest spell of classic Wilco. It grows on you like a nice smell that sticks to your clothes. It fades strong into respect. They're better than you think a band could be that your friends don't know. 

 

Imagine Wilco but not. Picture a claim like, 'this is a band you can wake and sleep to.' To say, 'this is iPod' doesn't fit. Instead, say, 'this can bring back the roasting years you spent in old yards, the driving when you first got a car, the piercing overlay of those first months of new kissing, something you hear speeding and free.' Here's what Hollands can roll: they're the kind of band you would have liked when you first discovered music. You can play them for your parents with the thread that splits over the wire connecting momentary chips of the Grateful Dead to slashing cuffs of Nirvana. This means something basic: Hollands sings songs that sound like stories from different times of your life played together in one night, like a surreal voice-over to dreams you had in different moments of your sleep. They capture stress and make it beautiful. "Dirty Rum" is close like a book pulled close to your face late at night. "I'm just dreaming / through the cold light / of this winter morn," he sings. "So we will polish our graves / we will tell our grandsons to do the same." Here is the epic conscience that fits into a surreal composite of a slow ballad. Here you can say something cool to a kid you don't have; here is where you can find your family and your friends sing in the same saloons. In Hollands songs, there are kids and television prime-time nights, theme songs that twist into music videos you recorded with happy panic Saturday nights alone. This is what you fell asleep to after a Saturday night before you could drink, back in your mind all those years ago -- that song on the radio you waited for, that kept you up late in August, that you tried to catch and record on cassette: Hollands is the band you called the DJ about, hoping to snatch a new release for the trips to school on the bus.

 

In "Over and Out," the song warms with a rough drum tumble laid out over an early 90s guitar riff. There is the faint slap of grunge grinding. "You better go back home," John Paul sings. "I heard you once and I heard you good," he says. "You better go inside," he stams: "You better run and hide." The song is kicking by now. " I heard you once and I heard you so well." Things start to explode. Boom, boom, boom. "Hell no! Hell no! -- Over and out there," he slams. "You seem so shiny (and alone) / and I know that's what you say / because you lie to me." There is thunder. Kick, kick kick. "It's a simple plan." Slank, shank, zoom. The writing here is beyond the thunder. Hollands can spill nostalgia into the songs that you want to drive to. In a car, listening to Hollands can make you think of home, the small details you miss, maybe the homes you can't return to, the rooms that can only turn over now only in your head; houses your parents sold in states you no longer live in. What you feel you've lost back there in the places you can't return, Hollands can fill up with a sunken, glowing shake. 

 

People compare bands to other bands; what I'm trying to do is compare Hollands with the spaces you need music to fill up. This is where they can flow out. They can synchronize 100 days in row with the socked blame that tugs in the heart. What do I mean? I mean they sound radio-friendly with that integrity you reserve for songs you think through, or experience against the lights of nights you regret with a smile, hung-over and slept in. 

 

The song "Strong Arm" can just destroy a morning or conclude a night. In slower moments, Hollands can channel Jeff Buckley's personal sort of wounded blues, twisted around words that sound like a good read. It's literate, or poetic, or lyrical. Live, the violin and strings match the thunder of the rock. They're smart. They're careful as hell, but kick out spontaneous. And here the building to the racing chorus supersedes the patience one reserves for the slow tones. Against the sharpening guitar riffs, back and forth, a call to a hard love: "And the ways you have are so bad / and the strong arm I have I had to have," he says. I think, 'I love you so much I almost have to keep you away from me.' And after the blooomed chorus again, "It's all in the love you lead." This twice or more. Guitar like railing. Bass in and out, coasting. Drums fast and slick. The climax comes together; the song punishes, pulls out, banks in, thrusts: "and the ways you have / are so bad." I think, 'I love you so much, I can't stand you.' And it cuts out to an acoustic fall-back. "And you float, on the sky / And I'm never, ever going to let you die." Or, 'I'm going to remember you and the way I love you like a habit.' Drips of finger picks. Slips of song coming: "You are my best friend," and this is coldly certain, romantically edged, flickered with confidence. 'I can connect you with people I always wanted you to be.' Heard over and over, you can picture a face to meet the song's energy, or fix a memory into the heat of the song's claim. I want to say to someone, 'the way this song melts you back into my mind, the way I avoided telling you the truth, I'm sorry. The thing we share is so intense I can't express it.' This is what I want you to hear from Hollands; this is what Hollands can leave packed into your lungs. Hollands write songs that say the things you want to tell the people you love, but they package those chords into moments that burst the small gesture of tight songs. The music hums with the sick traffic of lost conversations you remember suddenly. 

 

Leave off with "Coughing Boy." Produced beautifully by Colby Devereux, sung with trenchant gloss. For a band that can joke between songs during a live set, this is the stuff that can stick to the back of your throat. It thrives like an honest thought at an unexpected time. It's sentimental the way a Sunday night is easy -- clean, hazy, and future-coughing. The voice that sings Hollands songs sounds as if you clipped a dozen grand lines from a dozen late conversations and set them to music that could wrap into us eyeing stars overseas, camping out beyond the city. These are the songs you can drive to across the midwest. These are songs that rub into your brain like burning paper. Hollands manages to sound like a close friend calling home after a long time away. It's comfortable but thick. It's wet with things you wanted to say but didn't. They cling to the register of the emotions you blow up like childhood balloons; Hollands is the gust of music that takes you from a phase where you can't cry, and sets you down into the world of song-writing where you can taste the upcoming chill of bars you don't want to leave. 

 

Plainly: Hollands can deliver the steady rock n' roll you mix with reverbed ballads and wash down with fucking heat. Here's to the future you have setting your memories to their songs.

 

-Justin Rogers-Cooper

 

 

Christopher Weingarten, -Village Voice.com