THIS SEEMS VAGELY IMPLAUSIBLE that a band as important as Still House Plants started playing in 2015 and have just made their American debut this Thursday and Friday, at Shift/411 Kent in Brooklyn, in collaboration with Blank Forms. It’s been eight years since we’ve seen them weaving together the fabric of time with guitar, drums, vocals and nothing else. They started in the mid-2010s at the Glasgow School of Art and slowly made their way to London, releasing singles, cassettes and one-offs that are now hard to find (or at least impossible to buy). After a long hiatus at the start of the pandemic, the band are in a busy phase, having recently played Kings Place London and heading to gigs at the Magnet Festival in Wiesbaden and Haus Der Kunst in Munich, as well as the Terraforma Festival in Milan in June. They’re finishing a new album, which will be their second or third or fourth, depending on what one thinks about 20th century formats and other issues. Still House Plants is my favorite live band I’ve ever seen live.
Still House Plants became an obsession for me during lockdown. I first heard their recordings in early 2020 and felt they were the tonic I needed when life went digital until further notice. I listened to them stomping, scratching and screaming as I rode my bike along the 46th Street beltway, silent at lunchtime for months.
Still House Plants is as aggressively analog as a band can get. Guitarist Finlay Clark plays a mint green Stratocaster and avoids cleanly repeating figures while drummer David Kennedy plays little broken waffles, none of it obviously related to what Clark does. Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach has a deep voice and often seems to be performing a torch song, or trying to sing one over and over as she walks away from it. It rarely seems that the three get along or follow an impulse, and yet they are. The immediate analogues are things like Arto Lindsay and DNA or Big Flame or pieces of Captain Beefheart, if you slowed everything down and pinned each pattern to a piece of cardboard and glued them all into different rooms. Still House Plants sounds like music meant to fight the digital grid, if not destroy it, and yet the first music I read with enthusiasm from Hickie-Kallenbach was British garage, a genre as digital as it gets. In 2020, we had the first of several Zoom chats, and I asked him about it.
“I feel like you can hear what’s going on in the garage,” she said. “It’s very special. You can hear the edges of everything, every moment you’re meant to feel in the song’s arc. I always found it helpful in describing what I wanted to do with things when we were working together.
If you want to go to the source, you can watch a beautifully shot movie forty minute set from 2022, their performance at the Festival Onze Ambassade. Hickie-Kallenbach wears a striped shirt, looking a bit like an actor from a Peanuts staged adaptation at The Kitchen, and Clark smiles at her regularly. Kennedy plays drums with his head down, hitting in a newly heavy-handed way. Hickie-Kallenbach faces the back of the stage, tilting her head to establish a vertical axis, as Clark walks over to her and extracts a bit of information, wordlessly, sawing their low-slung guitar back and forth in the horizontal frame. They talk and play like close friends, without the need for obvious starting and ending points. As many times as I’ve listened to them, I don’t feel like I know the songs of Still House Plants. Their music gradually disassembles and reorganizes, allergic to the idea that everything will become fixed or known.
Their formal fracturing is somewhat linked to the pre-classical continuum; Clark recently put together a performance of a string quartet with electronics from Phaedra Ensemble at Cafe Oto in London and is set to release a solo album. Hickie-Kallenbach works at Oto in various roles and Kennedy works as a commercial artist and designer.
Two of their complete albums, Quick edit And long game, are on Spotify, as is their most recent (2021, so not-so-recent) single, “More More Faster,” but YouTube is full of live shows that don’t appear anywhere else. (A contemporary aspect of Still House Plants is that their music is both hidden and easy to find, with releases all over the digital landscape, unofficial or banned.)
In our last Zoom, at the end of 2022, it appeared that they had played at Berghain, the legendary Berlin dance club which does not allow photos and is extremely difficult to break into. We had to repeat the word to ourselves several times. “Berghain? “Berghain”. I didn’t even know of any bands with traditional instruments playing there. Not only that, but the sound team had listened to Still House Plants before they arrived.
“It was so weird to see this space, which has such a mystique around it, with all the lights on and the people working there just spinning,” Kennedy said. “I realized that there is a huge apparatus around all of this that makes sure everything works. I was so impressed with the quality of the sound engineers. Everything is super professional – they knew when to be flexible and when not.
“When not to be” could easily be the band’s motto.
