Howth - "Howth" [Album Review]

Howth

More than three and half years since the Great Recession began and two years since the start of a so-called recovery, the paucity of music that overtly addresses or in any way touches upon the all too common personal difficulties and stalled lives that, in part, characterize these times is rather astonishing. After enduring more than a few of their own trials and tribulations, Howth has released a beautiful pop-folk album that artfully illustrates common struggles, small pleasures and wistful longings for things once so commonplace that they were often taken for granted. Most significantly, it showcases Carl Creighton’s masterful songwriting skills, the likes of which have become all too rare in indie music.

Carl Creighton (vocals, acoustic guitar, keyboards, drums) and multi-instrumentalist and producer Blake Luley recorded Howth in a makeshift home studio. Adding yet another challenge to the home-recording and self-production process, their space burned down, damaging or destroying a good deal of their gear along with some tape from their sessions. They undauntedly completed Howth, which turns out to be one of the best sounding, necessarily lo-fi albums you’ll ever hear. It’s an intimate, very live sound with wonderfully mixed acoustic, electric and electronic instrumentation, along with a few judicially placed glitches.

Creighton’s lyrics are exceptionally well-written and extremely genuine, and his voice is captivatingly emotive. The instrumentals on Howth are very well performed and feature some of the better finger-picking to be found amongst the ranks of indie musicians. This is Creighton's and Luley’s first project together as Howth, and there is more on the way. For now, they’ve given us a gem of an album that disarmingly captures some of the less often (and more difficultly) examined events and charcteristics of the times in which we live.

Howth: [official]