Connor Brown
I fell in love with Anemone Red a couple of years ago and turn to it consistently when I need to feel a sense of calm, hope, courage, and love. Ease the Work is going to occupy that same space, easy. "The Most Gorgeous Day in History" just really captures the wonder and horror and joy of just being alive on any given Tuesday. Thanks, Hou, for yet another beauty.
Immediate, passionate, occasionally dissonant, open, open, open, and very often sublime, Ease the Work is an undeniably grand statement from the instrumental ensemble Hour. Conceived by composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Michael Cormier-O’Leary (Friendship, 2nd Grade, Dear Life Records) and delivered live by nine musicians in early 2023, Ease the Work is where breathy timbre and cinematic swoon factor meet in communion. Atmosphere and old school melody shake hands. Nice seeing you again.
To record Ease the Work, the crew traveled via ferry with an entire studio’s worth of equipment to an old theater on Peaks Island in Maine, months before the first tourists would show up. The week-long session started with an island-wide power outage that halted recording on the first day, and ended with twelve songs that walk steadily between longing and contentment, sentimentality and subtlety, the lift of harmony and the compulsion of a melody you wish would play forever.
Formed in the flourishing underground of West Philadelphia in the latter half of the 2010s, Hour has fluctuated in size and scope around Cormier-O’Leary’s clear yet open-ended harmonic framework and ambitious ear. Ease the Work builds on the bedrock of Hour’s first two records, Tiny Houses and Anemone Red, and represents the group at its most expansive in sound and membership. Ten musicians, heads from punk, experimental, and classical scenes up and down the east coast, made up the band at Hour’s August ‘23 residency in Queens, New York. The stage wasn’t big enough. The string section had to set up on the floor. Cormier-O’Leary has contributed notably across the landscape of independent music, and Hour is living, breathing, deep listening proof of his community-minded ethos.
Hour’s music cuts a broad pathway, and remains hard to classify or compare. Perhaps most at home beside work from Bill Frisell, Eiko Ishibashi, ECM Records, or the Louisville experimental chamber group Rachel’s, Ease the Work shows us life on the boundary of composition and improvisation. It reaches for the sweeping gestures and inspired pacing of classic film scores, Frank Sinatra ballads, and Scott Walker’s pop orchestra. It also retains the arresting intimacy of the band’s early work. Strings swell and harmonize in counterpoint with electric guitar, clarinet, and piano, while drums, synth pads, and field recordings complete the aural world. Cormier-O’Leary says, “it isn’t a soundtrack. If it was, there would be a movie.” Ease the Work might be its own movie. The protagonist walking. A gorgeous day darkening. A cat in the window. Always strange, always familiar. Sometimes struggling. Sometimes eroding into disorder. Sometimes pressing on, lifting up. Never quite into heaven. Always into beauty.
Recorded in 2023, between May 13th and 20th, at the Greenwood Garden Playhouse on Peaks Island in coastal Maine. Special thanks to the Lions Club, Niki Taylor, Margaret Myers, and Baba’s Cafe for opening the island to us.
Engineered by Keith J. Nelson, with Lucas Knapp
Additional recording by Lucas Knapp in Philadelphia, PA
Mixed by Lucas Knapp
Mastered by Jack Callahan
Jason Calhoun - synth
Michael Cormier-O’Leary - electric guitar, classical guitar, percussion
Em Downing - violin
Matt Fox - viola
Elisabeth Fuchsia - violin
Peter Gill - bass
Lucas Knapp - radio effects, field recordings, piano
Evan McGonagill - cello
Peter McLaughlin - drums, percussion
Keith J. Nelson - bass clarinet, clarinet
Erika Nininger - piano, rhodes
Abi Reimold - electric guitar
Additional thanks to Meghan Cormier-O’Leary, Dan Wriggins, Wendy Eisenberg, Ben Lovell (Lily Tapes and Discs), Will Kennedy and Joey DeGrado (Sleeper Records), Shannon Lee Byrne, Timm Donohue, Frank Meadows, Jon Samuels, Matt Bachmann, Ava Mirzadegan, Joe Pera, Ryan Dann, and Gordon Bok, Ed Trickett, & Ann Mayo Muir.
Some catchy tracks on here, and my guy is not afraid to rip a guitar solo. Sounds like Daniel Johnston country at times, and the album cover looks like a hip-hop record. Cidimon Arustavi
Wonderfully spectral guitar songs from Rob Byrd have the subtlety and beauty of the quiet parts of post-rock songs, all tension and mood. Bandcamp New & Notable Oct 3, 2022
