by Chad Rafferty (@chadrafferty)
Disheveled Cuss was born as Nick Reinhart’s effort to create more “normal songs”. As a result, the project's 2020 debut served up a collection of songs featuring some more accessible structures, while retaining the heart of an outsider. On Into the Couch, the self-released second LP under the Disheveled Cuss moniker, he continues to stay weird in all the right ways. The album as a whole is flush with moments that bait you into thinking a pop hook or familiar change is on the way, yet Reinhart manages to zag at every zig, keeping both his melodies and thematic elements surprising and refreshing.
If Disheveled Cuss’ self-titled debut exists in a self-described space between early Weezer and Teenage Fanclub, its successor falls somewhere closer to the Elliott Smith side of 90s indie rock, though even this comparison feels lazy, as each song on the record comes through as distinctly Nick Reinhart. The record manages to escape the prog and/or math rock labeling of his work with Tera Melos, but these sparse, thoughtful tracks still feature the same precise and exacting focus on texture, and they’re flooded with self-reflection, self-doubt, and painful moments of longing and regret.
Maybe more so than any of his previous projects, Into the Couch presents Reinhart’s vocal as the centerpiece, with cuttingly introspective lyrics covering everything from facing the slippery slope toward loserdom to a complicated relationship with memory. While it isn’t quite a purely acoustic singer-songwriter album, Into the Couch is chock full of some of the most intimate songs you’ll find in Reinhart’s discography, which rise and fall in a way that seems to simulate the volatile nature of an anxious existence.
“Some People Wanna Forget,” an up-tempo meditation on how the past informs the present, quickly transitions into “Abbott,” an unnerving chant-along that builds into a delicately nightmarish exercise in noise. Next up is “Grease Stain,” a simple guitar track punctuated by some excellent horn work as its hook and an exploration into the depths of self-loathing, claiming simply that “I am the stain that you try to get out”.
Some of Reinhart’s best writing continues to show up on the back half of the album, like the quietly powerful chorus on “Shitty Coffee Table”: “come a little closer now / and tell me that you hate me / say the quiet part out loud / you’re not fooling anybody”. On the stunning closer “Into the Couch,” Reinhart returns to the constant battle with things long gone, singing about “driving to the past / trying not to crash / almost got erased / but I found out the address”.
With Into the Couch, which he describes as one of his favorite things he’s ever made, Reinhart finds himself continuing to cover new ground, shedding light not on the external madnesses of the past few years, but on how they can affect our internal selves and, hopefully, figuring out a way to move forward.