There’s a glitch in “Stranger Maker,” a song from Ah Holly
Fam’ly’s new album Reservoir. At their sleepy Thursday night
rehearsal in outer Northeast, the eight-piece breeze through a set of
orchestral folk they’re prepping for the next day’s show. That is,
until the discovery of a very un-Fam’ly-like resonance in this newish
song. Frontman Jeremy Faulkner suggests they sweeten the harmony.
Flutist Alexi Erenkov diagnoses the problem more precisely in music
theory terms that put half the room at ease—and soar over my
head.
The mix of intuition and analysis the band use to get “Stranger
Maker” back on its feet sounds like several different languages being
spoken in one conversation. It’s as if I stepped out of the cozy living
room that greeted me an hour earlier and walked into a summit of Tascam
dreamers and classically trained boffins.
Faulkner is the reluctant leader of this clan. Along with his
whisper of a singing voice, Ah Holly Fam’ly’s sound includes the voices
of Becky Dawson (who is married to Faulkner) and Amelia Harnas; cello
and bass from Jeff Diteman; Whitney Menzel’s drums; and varied strings
and woodwinds contributed by Erenkov, Morgan Hobart, and Jared Arave.
Everyone composes for their own instrument. But it was Faulkner’s
private songbook, written throughout his teens in Idaho that in 2003
led to a spate of local shows in the college town of Moscow.
Just as Leonard Cohen’s lyrics attracted Faulkner to songwriting,
Faulkner’s own words inspired his collaborators to join him. “Lyrics
are always very important to me, and Jeremy always wrote great words,”
Diteman says. He was one of the group’s founding members, back when
they played under puckish variations on the name “The Holy Family” (Ah
Holly Fam’ly is where this game wound up). Once they moved to Portland,
the current lineup fell quickly into place. The way Harnas went from
friend of the group to a member is typical of the casual yet resolute
way people enter their fold. “Before I was in the band, when I only
lived in the house,” Harnas says, “I would sing harmony in the bathroom
above the practice space.”
Such timidity is a recurring theme in the group’s story. From the
name games of the early days to their initial reluctance to move to an
indie rock mecca, Ah Holly Fam’ly have insulated themselves from the
hype that can stunt a band’s musical growth.
The prize for this self-preservation is Reservoir, their
exceptionally fine-hewed second album. Here, they augment New Weird
America with old European chamber music. Their sound is poised and
ghostly—like a dilapidated house resting on a solid foundation of
sudden tempo changes. By combining the stately and the strange, Ah
Holly Fam’ly turn Reservoir into an extension of the group’s
core indie-folk influences.
Back to rehearsal and “Stranger Maker.” Harnas asks the summit, “So
the cello, violin, and flute are playing the same note?” It’s true.
Somehow, the harmonics of three middle A’s stacked atop each other
isn’t very Fam’ly. Then, in the way spunky computer hackers do it in
the movies, right after they’ve dropped a mouthful of technical jargon,
Erenkov offers a pithy solution: “Someone’s gonna have to play a
different note.”