Album Release: HOURGLASS FIGURE
ARTWORK by Katie Calfee
The double meaning of the phrase "Hourglass Figure"—the title of the second album by Brooklyn's Children Having Children—isn't a happy accident. Rather, it's a description of time personified. If our memories are grains of sand, then they don't actually disappear when they fall through the pinched middle of the hourglass. They're just transported to another part of the body and brain, tumbling around until they become skewed and reshaped into new truths or half-lies. In the 10 tracks here, each one of us is an hourglass figure—and we're all unreliable narrators.
Every song reflects the eternally mutative nature of time and memory by cycling through several dynamic sections, the sonics blossoming with classical flourishes, bridges and choruses folding in on themselves, and sudden shifts in time signature. Opener "Sight Unseen" begins archaically with a skeletal bed of Far-Eastern stringed instruments as Kaiser questions his own memory of abandoned love. But as the arrangement becomes fuller-bodied with strings and junkyard percussion, there's a hope that overtakes the loneliness. The memory becomes brighter and the torch song is no longer a torch song, but a full-on fireball brightening the night sky. Album highlight "Empress" turns to theatrical loud-quiet-loud shifts to recognize the temporary state of both humankind and the natural world, while the galloping piano of "Next to Nothing" conveys the narrator's realization that their frantic pace through life will only lead them to a dead end.
As an album obsessed with the allure of memories and our untrustworthy perception of time, it's appropriate that Hourglass Figure caps 15 years of Kaiser living in New York and 10 years of making music with bandmate Matt Heymann, who played bass throughout and co-wrote two of the songs. As with all of Children Having Children's releases, Kaiser played most of the guitars and keyboards himself, with rhythmic assistance from drummers Matt Walker (Smashing Pumpkins, Morissey, Garbage) and Bryan Garbe (Castoff, London Plane).
The transitory aesthetic of the album was influenced by several places Heymann and Kaiser visited together, from an impactful trip to Cuba to Bryan's wedding in Ireland to Chicago for final tracking sessions at Steve Albini's legendary studio Electrical Audio. While they ran into Albini in the lounge (wearing his trademark jumpsuit), the session was tracked by his fellow engineer Greg Norman, chosen by Kaiser for his work with Godspeed You! Black Emperor. For engineering, he sought out Grammy winner John Davis, who mixed the record back in Brooklyn at The Bunker Studio. Kaiser had discovered Davis through his jazz and electronic production work for drummer/composer Mark Guiliana, known for his playing on David Bowie's final album Blackstar.
Davis' thoughtful mixing and technical brilliance is felt the most on Hourglass Figure's haunting closer, "Eve"—a song that could function as a thesis for the entire album. "As the eve cedes the day and the clock proclaims love's disarray, I'll steal one last kiss on the stairway," Kaiser sings in his delicate and pained tenor. "We'll know what we chose not to say, but it's okay." Whether he's bidding farewell to a friend, a romance, a musical partnership, or an entire city, it's a bittersweet assurance that, despite our collectively warped view of time, we're all in this together.