Review: Hotel Books – Run Wild, Young Beauty

I’ll be honest, I’ve been waiting for the new Dance Gavin Dance album for a long time now. Acceptance Speech was one of my highlights of 2013, and their follow up has been marked to top my album of the year list since it was announced. And of course, they released it for streaming last night. That’s the same night that I was supposed to review the new Hotel Books album, Run Wild, Young Beauty. I honestly wasn’t quite sure how I was going to do that. I wasn’t sure how I was going to stay focused long enough to not jump back to DGD. It’s not that I’m not a fan of Hotel Books, but the build up to the DGD album had proved to be a bit too much for me to handle, apparently. I could not have possibly been more wrong. Midway through the opening track I was eating my words. If I had no integrity in my journalistic presence, I would have simply just published my notes, but seeing as they are mostly comprised of the word “wow”, I figured I take a crack at writing something of some substance.

Hotel Books have been an impressive band since they day they stepping on to the scene, however they entered into the sort of aggressive, poetic spoken word genre that La Dispute was more or less the face of. That isn’t to discredit other bands in the genre like Hotel Books or Being as an Ocean, but there was a definite shadow cast by La Dispute, and it seemed like a difficult one to claw out of. However, that is precisely what they did with Run Wild, Young Beauty, this is the album that propelled them to their own level, perhaps parallel to La Dispute, and arguably even above them on some counts, which is the truly impressive part.

The power behind this type of music really comes from the words; every aspect of the words, the lyrics themselves, the cadence, the delivery, how the words dance with, or fight against the melody, it’s a very heavy and very emotional type of music, and also very difficult to pull off. But Hotel Books nails it. The lyrics will actually cause you to stop and reflect on them, as they would in a novel, you find yourself pausing to understand the meaning behind every syllable and its composition. But unlike a novel, the next thing you know, you have missed an entire verse, and poetry of this magnitude is not something you merely skim over, you return to it, you skip back, over and over digesting every single moment; each word is truly captivating.

You know those albums that you put on in the background of your everyday life? Albums that you listen to while you’re working, or trying to fall asleep. Those times that the company of the music is comforting and its presence welcome, even if not entirely acknowledged; it breaks the silence, but the details are largely lost. This is not that album. This album is constantly and unwaveringly demanding your attention, and it honestly has every right to. It requires commitment. The second it starts to fade from your attention it will break straight into the forefront of your world once more, and keep poking at you until you devote to it the attention it deserves.

This is one of those albums that, as the final note rings out, you find yourself reeling, a bit unsure if what to do with yourself, trying to process what just happened, but a bit lost in the vacuum that silence created, trying to find your mental footing. And here I am, several listens later, still a bit unsure of what to do with myself with this new material, so I do what feels right and I just press play again. I suggest you do the same.