Given the unpredictability of his band Daughters, Alexis Marshall’s debut solo album either sounds exactly like one might expect it to—or nothing even close. Produced by Seth Manchester and featuring performances from Jaye Jayle guitarist Evan Patterson, Lingua Ignota’s Kristin Hayter, and Daughters drummer Jon Syverson, House of Lull . House of When is an experimental, almost entirely improvised work created with an ad-hoc mixture of (often broken) rock instrumentation and an assortment of items from the hardware store. “It’s pretty minimal on the traditional instrumentation,” Marshall tells Apple Music. “I don’t know how to play those instruments, so it seems sort of dishonest to structure a solo record around stuff I have no understanding of. I prefer instruments from Home Depot or appropriated from the basement, anyway.” Below, he comments on each track.
“Drink From the Oceans . Nothing Can Harm You”
“Although they may seem more abstract, the lyrics were written in a more linear fashion than I usually do. I was working a lot with repetition, so this song has a mantra that was inspired by the poetry of Robert Bly and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It was a lot of wordplay and repetition with minor changes, just changing a word here and there. It was fun for me to figure out how I could make adjustments to the line while saying something very different and simultaneously the same thing in general. Vocally, I was trying to channel Scott Walker to see if I could achieve even a fraction of what he can do.”
“Hounds in the Abyss”
“This was really inspired by early Swans material, primarily the Filth album. Jon, Evan, and I were having breakfast and listening to Filth, and I can’t remember the song, but there was something so fucking vicious about it, where it’s driving and pummeling over and over, and it’s just so fucking good. When we finished breakfast, they went into the studio, and I think I took a shower. When I got out, they were like, ‘Hey, we put this together if you want to listen to it.’ They had pretty much written all the guitars and drums for this song, directly influenced by that moment.”
“It Just Doesn’t Feel Good Anymore”
“This is a song that we wrote around one of Jon’s drum parts. Then we put some insane saxophone shit on it just to throw a curveball at people. The vocals were recorded at the very beginning of lockdown and a police car siren bled through the mic, which made me think of Ice-T’s The Iceberg/Freedom Of Speech album, with Jello Biafra doing this spoken-word thing about a new world order. I started channeling that moment and doing these hyper-aggressive commands, which seemed appropriate for the erratic, unstable feel of the song.”
“Youth as Religion”
“This was the first thing we wrote, which is strange because it’s very different than the rest of the record. It’s very downtempo and more self-reflective than the others. There are only two that are poetry-based spoken word, and this is obviously one of them. It has repetition with wordplay and minor variations, similar to ‘Drink From the Oceans.’ I really liked doing that because it gives you a false sense of security, where it’s familiar but also somewhat disquieting and disturbing, like the line about ‘desperation from a head wound.’”
“Religion as Leader”
“This song has almost the same lyrics as ‘Youth as Religion,’ but it’s like the other side of things. Where ‘Youth as Religion’ has hopefulness, I stripped all those lines for ‘Religion as Leader’ so it would be like the ugly, bad-as-it-gets version. This was another one built around a drum part that Jon came up with, and you can hear little things in there, like him tapping his foot or breathing, and we not only kept all that shit in there, but we amplified it in some spots because it offset some of the grace that ‘Youth as Religion’ has. Vocally, I intentionally came in late or early at times to help create a very unbalanced listening experience.”
“No Truth in the Body”
“Touring in Europe, you always come home with a shitload of coins. So, I had this bag of coins from all over the world and I knew I wanted to make a song out of it. We started with Seth and I spinning coins on all sorts of surfaces in the studio, and eventually we put down a piece of sheet metal and got a really good sound out of spinning them on that. So, we recorded about five or six minutes and then added a little bit of guitar and some sparse piano. Lyrically, I was reflecting on an emotional state on the final tour that I did in 2019 where I had a bulging disc in my neck and I was in a significant amount of pain and abusing my painkillers.”
“Open Mouth”
“Public Image Ltd.’s The Flowers of Romance album is a big inspiration for me on this record. That album is really carried by the drums and the vocals and, of course, repetition as well. If you listen to that and our record, you will see very clearly there are a lot of similarities between what I’m doing and what John Lydon was doing. I think ‘Open Mouth’ is a good example of that. Vocally, I wanted to give it a sense of confusion by putting my voice in every space possible between the rest periods. It was surprisingly difficult, but a fun exercise.”
“They Can Lie There Forever”
“This was built around two recordings I made—one of a clogged air vent at a venue I was playing in Vancouver, and one of some birds in an air vent in a house I was renting. We put those together to make ‘the riff’ or something—I’m not sure what to call it. We added some floor tom and a dresser drawer that I put a bunch of doorknobs and other basement scraps in. Lyrically, it’s inspired by a car accident I saw in the mid-’90s where no one was there yet and there was a dead body hanging out of the driver’s side. I can still see it in my head.”
“Night Moving”
“Evan was outside on the patio, smoking, when he wrote this lovely little thing in GarageBand with lots of strings. We immediately took it and played it backwards and totally mutilated and ruined Evan’s really lovely piece of music. We eventually turned it into this fucking abomination with baking sheets and hammers and aluminum gutters and a paintbrush with hardened lacquer on it. But it worked really well, and Evan seemed happy with it. At least, I hope he was happy.”