Album Review: 37 Houses – Strangers

Good ideas that lack the right substance to shape them.

37 Houses’ EP, Strangers, is an album swept under the rug without the passion to crawl out. First, you have a raw, fast strumming, punk guitar. Then, a short plucking guitar in your left ear that sounds nice at first, but drones on without variation too long and scratches your brain in the wrong way. Everything about it speaks amateur sounds. The mixing often drowns out the vocals. That isn’t always bad as the vocalist’s range is limited, and that fact sometimes seeps through. The majority of the songs have some good ideas, but they don’t do anything with them. It’s like someone wrote one minute of a song, then copy and pasted it twice to fill time. “Shadow Puppets,” the third song in the EP, does switch it up at the end, but it only introduces another new idea instead of building on the ones it has already established. 

The album starts with the song “Strangers.” It starts with the plucking guitar before the rest of the sounds quickly jumps in all at once. Whenever the vocalist hits a lower note, it gets a little airy and sounds out of place, like your affluent stepmom singing Elvis’s cover of Blue Christmas karaoke night. It’s a shame that a lot of the songs push the vocals this way, as her high end sounds great. Near the end of the song the lyrics “I’m so full of love” are screamed with lots of emotion behind it, and if you really get into it, you’ll be yelling along too. 

The fifth song, “Helium,” opens with the drums. The drums are the most consistently enjoyable instrument throughout the EP, so it’s nice to see them get to kick this one off. During some parts of the song it cuts to just the drums, bass and vocals before building to the chorus. The song gets to breathe and has some really fun guitar parts that bend and whine. The lyrics are cute.

Finally, “Undertow” brings it to a relaxed but passionate end. This is the song you listen to when you cry while eating your can of tuna seasoned with olive oil and salt. The keys in this song bounce between ears in a soulful way. It’s one of the best on the EP.