The Daily Spin, September 16
The Oh Hellos | Dear Wormwood
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
This is the finale of our ‘Saturday Nights at the (Album) Club’ series - thank you all to those of you who submitted over the past 12(!) weeks. It’s been a pleasure. Going forward, Saturdays will return to being a wild card selection.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite song from each album right here.
Album: Dear Wormwood (2015)
Artist: The Oh Hellos
Link:
We’ve reviewed works by the Oh Hellos three times now, having visited Boreas and Zephyrus in January - but this is the first full-length that we’ve taken a look at, and I’m left feeling a little bit whelmed, because if nothing else, it makes deeply apparent what little growth in sound the group has shown over the past decade.
It’s not fair to judge their first album for that, though, and so I won’t. If anything, I find this more palatable than the other stuff we’ve reviewed by The Oh Hellos up to this point, and I’ll show that in my rating, but it still just fits less for me than I’d like.
The group is at their very best when it’s sparse, harsh, and contemplative, not the folksy Christian cousins of Imagine Dragons - and too often, far too frequently, that’s where this album wanders to, again and again and again. One of my favorite parts of the album on my listen this morning en route to a Target trip was hearing the 12:45 bell from the Minneapolis City Hall - a fact I only clocked when I turned down the music and the volume of the bell didn’t change, but it worked surprisingly well as a transition add between ‘Caesar’ and ‘This Will End’.
I do appreciate that the group takes more of a C.S. Lewis route than a Hillsong route, but where the world of Narnia separates me enough that I can appreciate the allegories without feeling slammed by them, Dear Wormwood instead presses it into you just enough to leave a mark, sort of like carpet laid on, sort of uncomfortable and hard to get rid of.
There are good moments within this - ‘This Will End’ stands out, as does the duology of ‘Bitter Water’ and ‘There Beneath’, but it’s about a coin flip when it comes down to it.
Rating: 7.3/10
Best Tracks: Bitter Water; There Beneath
Worst Tracks: Soldier, Poet, King; Danse Macabre; Exeunt