While initially hopeful, it's difficult to stay dancing to much of Hunting's You've Got Love (But It Even Tears You Apart) — what begins as a full-blooded jubilee becomes increasingly and achingly depressing until it's nothing but a scabby, bleeding heart. The striking lyrics shake to the core, unraveling hope like a pipe dream and reminding us of our faults, our misgivings we work to conceal through smiles and pleasantries. Building a bright electro/indie-pop stage and setting it ablaze, Hunting have created a jarring gem; You've Got Love (But It Even Tears You Apart) is, honestly and ultimately, a delightful bummer.
Really, it's a heartbreak we should've seen coming — a hasty reader might see the record's subtitle as "Even If It Tears You Apart," which is at least hopeful and palliative in its reassurance of love, that maybe it's all you really need. But that doesn't seem to be what the Vancouver-based duo are communicating here; it's quite the opposite, actually. Here, even the love one has is prickly and unforgiving.
The duo — married couple Bradley Ferguson and Jessicka Yliruusi — recorded the album over the course of 10 days with a bevy of collaborators like Paul Rigby, Jesse Zubot, sax player Dave Say, and drummer Daniel Ruiz. You've Got Love is Hunting's third album, and while it certainly maintains Ferguson's lyrical particularity and immediacy, there's a decided downward shift at the core of each track here. Consider tracks like 2014's "Everything Will Be Okay" or "Lonely Happy" (in which Ferguson sings, "I'm still lonely but I'm happy now") — the titles themselves hint at hope in the face of pain or loneliness, that there might yet be hope for healing. In comparison, You've Got Love is a perennially hopeless scab, bleeding as if never to be healed for all the solipsistic picking.
The lyrics here uphold Hunting's knack for incisive and pithy utterances that pack a punch, for seeing a kind of visceral truth in the mundane within interpersonal relationships. It's the uniqueness of the sentiments — the nuanced excavation of sadness or malaise or anger or fear — that make the album what it is. "They never stay, they only leave, I still don't know how to behave," Ferguson's soft voice muses on the album's first track, "Hurting You, Hurts Me." The heavy words give one pause as twinkling piano twirls, the music airy and sweet and flowing in such a way as to laugh in the face of the paralysis that comes from not knowing how you're expected to behave. "I'm picking up the pieces of hearts broken before, and looking for the reason you shouldn't walk right through that door," he sings; a reason never arrives, only the dizzying persistence of the realization that "hurting you hurts me."
The rest of the tracks contain no less heartbreakingly moving words. "Last chance to have a perfect life," Ferguson insists on the title track, "You've Got Love," as he rusts waiting to be seen, people moving about him unaware of the cataclysm of feeling within him. A line as vibrantly grim and deliciously emo as "the sun is shining but it's raining in your heart" is echoed again later in the record on the frenetic, jazzy "Cat Eyes"— "the sun is shining but it's raining in my heart" — pointing to the shared pain of failed love.
One of the most beautiful songs on the album is cloaked in the glossy veneer of Old Hollywood glamour, but as is the modus operandi here, it too simmers deceptively before it begins to blister. Aptly, the track is called "Hollywood Love Song," and after a haunting, garbled initial chorus of Ferguson and Yliruusi's voices — cautioning us of their shared culpability every time their love has gone wrong — Ferguson's voice begins, clarion: "Tell me again how I disappoint you / Tell me again and look me in the eye." It's combative, not at all what the grand piano would lead one to expect. Sonically, it could soundtrack a Douglas Sirk melodrama, but lyrically it's as grim as Lana Del Rey's "Ultraviolence," revealing the lies in the kind of love that Hollywood peddles. "I wake up afraid to look in your eyes / I have a darkness inside / Takes me by surprise / Don't let it take you from me / Don't say goodbye," Yliruusi pleads halfway through the track. "Tried to make the reasons I hate myself your demons instead," she sings in a confessional tone, conveying something we all might be ashamed of, something we all might want to forget.
There is such an intense grit here that lends the album, with its electro/indie-pop scaffolding, a modern urgency. Time and again Ferguson and Yliruusi sing of that which is taboo, those sentiments that lurk within us but are verboten because of how painful it is for others to hear them. So many of our sadnesses aren't expungeable — they don't have an easy fix and can't be erased. Instead, they simply are, in all their flatness, heaviness, painfulness — this flat heaviness is what the album communicates bluntly. The endlessly danceable, punchy "Hit Me Jane" is a delightfully dark example of this; "So sorry about last night, again" Yliruusi sings, and that "again" lands like a blow to the gut.
"Nothing is quite the way it seems / And it's all because of me," Ferguson whispers on "Broken," speaking to an ouroboros-like dissatisfaction. "If I could, I'd find a way," he goes on, suggesting there is no point in trying anymore to find a way. "Broken" is the final track, and it contains a weeping violin that fizzles out like a dying lightbulb. You've Got Love (But It Even Tears You Apart) is an album that doesn't pretend to have any answer, and for this reason, listening to it is paradoxically liberating. The warmth of the friction between the pop of the music and the nihilism of the lyrics seems to suggest a kind of safety — that things can't possibly get worse — which is certainly a calming thought. Everything is shit and life is unfair, but that Hunting are able to voice the things we've been taught to be ashamed of is revolutionary. This voicing — and the dancing and sing-alongs that it inspires — is perhaps how we shore up the strength to build hope.
(Nevado)Really, it's a heartbreak we should've seen coming — a hasty reader might see the record's subtitle as "Even If It Tears You Apart," which is at least hopeful and palliative in its reassurance of love, that maybe it's all you really need. But that doesn't seem to be what the Vancouver-based duo are communicating here; it's quite the opposite, actually. Here, even the love one has is prickly and unforgiving.
The duo — married couple Bradley Ferguson and Jessicka Yliruusi — recorded the album over the course of 10 days with a bevy of collaborators like Paul Rigby, Jesse Zubot, sax player Dave Say, and drummer Daniel Ruiz. You've Got Love is Hunting's third album, and while it certainly maintains Ferguson's lyrical particularity and immediacy, there's a decided downward shift at the core of each track here. Consider tracks like 2014's "Everything Will Be Okay" or "Lonely Happy" (in which Ferguson sings, "I'm still lonely but I'm happy now") — the titles themselves hint at hope in the face of pain or loneliness, that there might yet be hope for healing. In comparison, You've Got Love is a perennially hopeless scab, bleeding as if never to be healed for all the solipsistic picking.
The lyrics here uphold Hunting's knack for incisive and pithy utterances that pack a punch, for seeing a kind of visceral truth in the mundane within interpersonal relationships. It's the uniqueness of the sentiments — the nuanced excavation of sadness or malaise or anger or fear — that make the album what it is. "They never stay, they only leave, I still don't know how to behave," Ferguson's soft voice muses on the album's first track, "Hurting You, Hurts Me." The heavy words give one pause as twinkling piano twirls, the music airy and sweet and flowing in such a way as to laugh in the face of the paralysis that comes from not knowing how you're expected to behave. "I'm picking up the pieces of hearts broken before, and looking for the reason you shouldn't walk right through that door," he sings; a reason never arrives, only the dizzying persistence of the realization that "hurting you hurts me."
The rest of the tracks contain no less heartbreakingly moving words. "Last chance to have a perfect life," Ferguson insists on the title track, "You've Got Love," as he rusts waiting to be seen, people moving about him unaware of the cataclysm of feeling within him. A line as vibrantly grim and deliciously emo as "the sun is shining but it's raining in your heart" is echoed again later in the record on the frenetic, jazzy "Cat Eyes"— "the sun is shining but it's raining in my heart" — pointing to the shared pain of failed love.
One of the most beautiful songs on the album is cloaked in the glossy veneer of Old Hollywood glamour, but as is the modus operandi here, it too simmers deceptively before it begins to blister. Aptly, the track is called "Hollywood Love Song," and after a haunting, garbled initial chorus of Ferguson and Yliruusi's voices — cautioning us of their shared culpability every time their love has gone wrong — Ferguson's voice begins, clarion: "Tell me again how I disappoint you / Tell me again and look me in the eye." It's combative, not at all what the grand piano would lead one to expect. Sonically, it could soundtrack a Douglas Sirk melodrama, but lyrically it's as grim as Lana Del Rey's "Ultraviolence," revealing the lies in the kind of love that Hollywood peddles. "I wake up afraid to look in your eyes / I have a darkness inside / Takes me by surprise / Don't let it take you from me / Don't say goodbye," Yliruusi pleads halfway through the track. "Tried to make the reasons I hate myself your demons instead," she sings in a confessional tone, conveying something we all might be ashamed of, something we all might want to forget.
There is such an intense grit here that lends the album, with its electro/indie-pop scaffolding, a modern urgency. Time and again Ferguson and Yliruusi sing of that which is taboo, those sentiments that lurk within us but are verboten because of how painful it is for others to hear them. So many of our sadnesses aren't expungeable — they don't have an easy fix and can't be erased. Instead, they simply are, in all their flatness, heaviness, painfulness — this flat heaviness is what the album communicates bluntly. The endlessly danceable, punchy "Hit Me Jane" is a delightfully dark example of this; "So sorry about last night, again" Yliruusi sings, and that "again" lands like a blow to the gut.
"Nothing is quite the way it seems / And it's all because of me," Ferguson whispers on "Broken," speaking to an ouroboros-like dissatisfaction. "If I could, I'd find a way," he goes on, suggesting there is no point in trying anymore to find a way. "Broken" is the final track, and it contains a weeping violin that fizzles out like a dying lightbulb. You've Got Love (But It Even Tears You Apart) is an album that doesn't pretend to have any answer, and for this reason, listening to it is paradoxically liberating. The warmth of the friction between the pop of the music and the nihilism of the lyrics seems to suggest a kind of safety — that things can't possibly get worse — which is certainly a calming thought. Everything is shit and life is unfair, but that Hunting are able to voice the things we've been taught to be ashamed of is revolutionary. This voicing — and the dancing and sing-alongs that it inspires — is perhaps how we shore up the strength to build hope.
