by Benji Heywood (@benjiheywood)
There’s a scene in the 1985 film Back to the Future where our time-traveling hero, Marty McFly, is having dinner with his family thirty years in the past. His uncle, who in the 1985 present is jailed, here in ’55 is enjoying the hell out of his crib. In fact, Marty’s grandmother comments that his little baby uncle cries every time they take him out. The look on Marty’s face, played by an eternally young Michael J. Fox, contains nostalgia’s warm recognition of the past mixed with the surprise of the unexpected safely resolved.
This heady blend of past and present is precisely what listening to HOUSE OF CONFUSION, Trace Mountains’ delightfully breezy third album, is like. Much is made in the press materials about Dave Benton – who for all intents and purposes is Trace Mountains – losing his warehouse job at the beginning of COVID and then keeping his same schedule, but writing songs instead of stacking boxes. It’s an instructive anecdote. The songs on HOUSE OF CONFUSION benefit from Benton’s workmanlike approach. Each tune sounds so effortlessly poignant that one assumes the album was written in a single afternoon, sitting on a riverbank in golden sunshine, guitar in hand. But any good craftsperson knows, it takes a ton of effort to appear effortless.
Long gone are Benton’s raucous LVL UP days. HOUSE OF CONFUSION trades distorted guitars for ambling acoustics, dreamy pedal steels, and countryside songwriting. Petty, Neil Young, Wilco; the regular touch-points apply. Trace Mountains is less a homage to the great alt-country songwriters of the past and more just good tunes that owe a bit of debt, as if Benton were paying the tip on a dinner bought by the legends he emulates.
Album opener “SEEN IT COMING” starts in media res, as if we opened the door to Benton’s studio to find him already performing. The song sparkles with crisp, clean production, mellotron and pedal steel. Like on every song that follows, Benton’s warmly familiar vocal on “SEEN IT COMING” grounds the tune in the present while suggesting a certain de ja vu – my wife and I spent a long car ride listening to the album trying to figure out who Benton’s voice reminds us of only to conclude that, having loved 2020’s Lost in the Country, it reminds us of him.
“SEEN IT COMING” acts like a statement of purpose. If you like what you’ve heard in the first four minutes of listening to HOUSE OF CONFUSION, you’ll like the whole album. It’s the kind of collection where ten different people could easily have ten different favorite songs. For my money, “7 ANGELS” and “LATE” are the jams. “7 ANGELS” has the album’s most compelling vocal melody and “LATE” has the album’s most intriguing instrumentation, adding samplers, synths, and drum machines to Benton’s organic mulch, which helps alleviate a bit of the monochromaticity that creeps in after half an album.
This is not to say the album suffers from a sameness or that by the halfway mark the songs grow tiresome, rather that Benton wisely begins to integrate some wider bends in his lazy river. “AMERICA” is a great road trippin’ tune, with searching lyrics – a motif revisited time and again on the album. It seems Benton’s house of confusion is the result of seeking without finding, but he doesn’t ever wallow in it or seem nonplussed. There’s a comfortable ambivalence that allows for us as listeners to draw our own conclusions.
The album concludes strongly, with “EYES ON THE ROAD” – which, if you told me was cowritten by Mike Campbell, I would believe you, it’s that good – and “HEART OF GOLD,” the album’s tender finale. Over gentle fingerpicking and JR Bohannon’s gorgeous pedal steel, Benton assures us “the hardest part is over now.” Looking ahead to 2022 and the endless dumpster fire that seems to be modern American post-fact neo-liberal consumerism-on-methamphetamine life, I’ve never wished so badly for the prophetic to be true. At the very least, HOUSE OF CONFUSION offers us a momentary escape and for that, I’m grateful.