With wry lyrics and twisting guitar hooks, Seattle's Hollow Bodies splice several strains indie rock to elate, debate and mourn American life. The band’s oddball story songs revere the yawning fuzz-folk of Yo la Tengo and warm humor of Super Furry Animals.
In 2015, Songwriter Anand Balasubrahmanyan joined guitarist Chris Dewar and drummer Josh Lindgren to form Hollow Bodies. Began as a prog-rock band about the Iliad, the group decided to widen their scope after agreeing they had already written the best song about Agamemnon.
Turning their focus to modern life, Hollow Bodies formed an unconventional power trio consisting of just two guitars and drums. The group used an army of effect pedals and alternate tunings to let each guitar fill a distinct space in the mix--creating bellowing low notes, looping feedback and raucous leads with just two sets of hands.
The band joined a local scene searching for artistic crevices in the crater of Seattle’s tech boom, playing the early shows with Tres Leches and writing for cult-comedy gameshow The Future is Zero.
Their first album, Night After Night (2017), spun satirical yarns over a lush bed of guitars. Recorded across a single weekend at the Recovery Room in Ballard, the record captures the loud and live energy of their early performances. Night kick starts with the catchy stomp of "Strangers," a dating app blues number about swipers projecting their hopes for themselves on other people. "Pity Me" uses the story of Aroldis Chapman to question why athletes accused of sexual assault are allowed to frame themselves as victims. "One of Us" is one of those laugh-while-crying songs, skewering anti-immigrant politicians whose caustic logic boils down to: "only one of us can be one of us."
Playing shows around Seattle, at both improv comedy clubs and traditional rock clubs, Hollow Bodies honed their sensibility in venues that embraced humorous storytelling and encouraged the virtues of performers playing off each other.
During one memorable show inside a decommissioned immigrant detention center in Seattle’s International District, Dewar’s father heckled the band for playing songs that were “too long.” That spring drummer Josh Lindgren left the band to become an agent for podcasts at CAA.
Over the next year, Hollow Bodies continued to write new material and perform with a series of session drummers who were either too enthusiastic or too indifferent to stay with the band. After one drummer quit the group a month before they were scheduled to enter the studio for their sophomore effort, the band enlisted Dominic Cortese (Warren Dunes) to quickly learn the songs
Dominic’s driving psych-rock beats powered the resulting album, Tearing up the Field (2018), to new heights, expanding the band’s emotional and sonic range. Standouts like fan favorite “Wise Up” combine pedal-drones with a catchy chorus right out of 1964’s pop playbook. “Play with Fire” launches a mournful country lament into space with a whoosh of feedback and technicolor loops.
Buoyed by a year of playing with Dominic, and KEXP featuring single “Skin and Bones,” Hollow Bodies re-connected with the Recovery Room to record their third album, English and Guitar.
Departing from the brooding mood of their previous record, English and Guitar burst with joyful jams. Hollow Bodies collaborated with Seattle artists Feberfuge and Molly Michal to douse the tracks in bright harmonies and you can feel the lively vibe of friends dropping by the studio across the record.
The album sports playful country duets (Born in Kentucky) and sparkling jangle-pop inspired by Big Star (Light Behind the Clouds.) Cartoonist Nick Shively created art for the album, blowing up microscope slides so that the textural patterns on human skin looked like maps of an unknown country.
Hollow Bodies released English and Guitar, in January 2020 with a raucous show at the Sunset Tavern. Sadly, COVID cancelled the rest of their tour and scattered the band across the country with Chris and Dominic becoming new fathers, and Anand moving to Chicago to support COVID vaccine distribution.
Marijuana review podcast “The Roll-up” adopted English and Guitar’s title track as their theme music, which made the band members both proud and afraid to tell their mothers.
Photos by Sheri Foreman courtesy of Ballard VOX
Cartoons by Meagan DeGrand
