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Hear Spook Houses’ Slacker-Rock Anthem ‘Bad Sound’

Spook Houses

It takes a certain disposition to sing about a gray hair when you’re in your early 20s. New Jersey’s Spook Houses are of that disposition. From the raucous quartet’s just-released debut album, Trying, three-minute anthem “Bad Sound” scrawls out the gist of that feeling via ragged, tempo-shifting slacker-pop, colored by drowsy harmonica and twisty, dead-eyed wordplay. The coming-of-age disillusionment bottled up here has more recently been expressed via the bedroom synth constructions of Youth Lagoon or Neon Indian, but Spook Houses approach it with window-blasting indie-rock guitar that more closely recalls Modest Mouse, Weezer, or more recent descendants like Yuck, Japandroids, or Jersey’s own Titus Andronicus. Before the song is over, they’ve blown away their boredom — and at least temporarily staved off adulthood — with a cathartic “whoa-oh-oh.”