Hundreds - Aftermath

It’s hard to tell pictorially; it’s just as difficult to tell musically on Aftermath. Again, it matters not what the Milners intend, the album is ripe for a number of interpretations – death, a failed relationship, maturation and uncertainty of the future. The ingenuity is how they have fashioned an album so obviously deeply personal but so approachable that listeners can project themselves into the narrative. While the songwriting has taken a great step forward in its continuity and narrative power, the most impressive leap for the duo is their sound. Cleverly not abandoning their Bjork-inspired electronic eclecticism, Hundreds have seamlessly woven in a bevy of natural elements – piano, strings, harp – to sit comfortably alongside and amongst the ever-present electronics.

“Aftermath” sets the blueprint for the rest of the album, Eva’s pristine vocals, full-toned and warm, entirely at ease whether out in front of the low-buzzing synths at the outset or at the eye of the swirling maelstrom of dancing piano lines, clamorous toms, and buzzing and punching electronics during its conclusion. From there, the journey unfolds, Eva admitting the roads to and from this point are many, “my truth is a ten-headed beast,” on the rich piano ballad, “Ten-Headed Beast”; she confidently forges ahead amidst chaos on the galloping “Our Past”, recalling Moses’ biblical journey through the Red Sea, “it will close like nothing happened…it will leave my feet back on the ground”. After the pulsing, celestial centerpiece, “Interplanetary”, where Eva reassures, “all you can do is keep calm”, Aftermath takes a turn toward the more complex and chaotic.

The grinding “Rabbits On The Roof” and the industrially-laced “Please Rewind” bookend album highlight, “Beehive”. A song as knotty and labyrinthine as its namesake, featuring winding Indian-tinged synth plucks and droning percussion, Eva hits at the spiritual theme of the album, “we’ll go far away from where we once began…and forget what it was before,” her vocals taking flight, slicing through the song’s honeycombs. Until this point, while flawless in timbre, Eva’s vocals do at times feel overly tempered by the album’s subtler cuts; this combined with a tendency toward the dramatic veer those songs toward campiness, the duo’s sincerity and their retention of their debut’s edginess pull them back from that cliff.

The comparatively minimal, foreboding “Stones” makes for a curious closer to an album that, until this point, seems to be striving for escape from darkness. “My memory’s all gone….we’ve become stones” can easily be taken as an implication of defeat or, at the very least, surrender, offering perhaps an unfortunate glimpse at what may resolve from Aftermath’s opening conundrum. However it may be, one would hope for the contrary for Hundreds after bounding forward from their debut to craft an album that so deftly marries the traditional and progressive, the personal and accessible. If there is a way, let it continue to be forward.