Music Review: Haters Club, ‘RIYH’
The reunited Twin Cities group’s earwormy new EP finds them exploring a range of Americana styles.
Haters Club RIYH album artwork.
Haters Club’s previous brief existence began in 2011. With songwriter DJ Kukielka and guitarist Ted Held at the helm, the Twin Cities pop/rock outfit played a handful of shows and released an EP, The Golden Age of Haters Club, before going on hiatus. Now, after a decade of other creative pursuits, Haters Club has reunited and produced RIYH, a playful, multifaceted EP that reflects the broad music experience they’ve accumulated.
Kukielka and Held (who played together in other projects in the intervening years) are now joined by bassist Donovan Johnson and drummer Erik Olson. Together they’ve crafted a set of songs that are sonically diverse but carry the common thread of Kukielka’s enigmatic, reflective lyrics and standout vocals.
RIYH opens with “It Ain’t Easy,” a catchy, mid-to-slow-tempo rootsy single that showcases Kukielka’s appealing voice: Jack White meets Shannon Hoon with a dash of Neil Young. Held’s harmonies and rich, almost crunchy guitar fill out the satisfying sound.
Lyrically, “It Ain’t Easy” is about trying to make things right in the face of insurmountable challenges: “I been trying to help my friends but it ain’t easy / Seems like everybody’s going down in flames.” Despite the certain dismal outcome (“it’s good to be alive / Death is closer than it seems”), there’s a feeling of camaraderie in trying to make things better: “And the captain tells the crew that the ship has run aground / And we did all we could do but we lost more than we found.”
This song could almost join my growing connection of feel-good songs about there being no hope, except there’s so much love and warmth in it. The upshot seems to be that we’re all screwed, but at least we have each other, and “It Ain’t Easy” closes with the refrain: “We’ll be together when we go.”
The next track, “Teenage Love,” takes us down a very different musical path, hypnotizing and soothing with elements of jazz, soul/R&B and a kind of gentle psychedelia. The lyrics perfectly encapsulate the confusion and excitement inherent in its opening line, “Teenage love don’t know where to go”: “Skip class soft bed shirt off face red / tongue kiss tongue tied…” A tumultuous and awkward time of life is rendered sweet and charming by the dreamy instrumentation and soft vocals, bathing it in a rosy glow of nostalgia.
Haters Club. Photo credit: Tony Nelson.
The instrumental interlude “Flamingo Sketches” carries the jazzy, contemplative sound of “Teenage Love” but with a reverb-loaded electric guitar standing in for vocals. It serves as a bridge to the second, more acoustic half of the EP.
“I Wouldn’t Blame You” is quietly anthemic, like if Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” stayed acoustic throughout. The cryptic lyrics also harken back to that song, posing questions like “Did you do all the drugs in California?” and “Did you love every girl that you lied to?” The past tense used in nearly every line seems to imply the person being asked has left or died, and leaves us wondering what a lifetime’s worth of choices and actions add up to—are they more than the sum of the parts or just an assortment of accumulated experiences?
RIYH ends on the bright progressive folk rock track “Persephone,” a contemplation of what life means and our place in the world:
I’ve been trying to figure out if we’re the good guys or the bad guys
I’ve been trying to figure out is it comedy or tragedy
Is it up to you? Is it up to me?
All I wanna know is what do you believe
Come on and tell me what do you believe
As the goddess of spring but also wife of Hades, Persephone would no doubt be asking herself these kinds of questions during the long winter months stuck in the underworld. As a citizen of this weird, chaotic spaceship known as Earth, I do as well. But the song (as well as the entire EP) gives us a glimmer of the irrepressible rebirth of life regardless of good or evil, comedy or tragedy, ending with the repeated line “Plant a seed and watch it grow.”
You can buy/stream RIYH now via Bandcamp; it’ll hit the other streaming platforms tomorrow, Friday January 13.
Haters Club celebrates their EP release Saturday, January 28 at Palmer’s Bar in Minneapolis. They’ll be joined by The Heavy Sixers (another local band celebrating a new music release) and Whiskey Rock ’n’ Roll Club!
Carol Roth. Photo credit: Dan Lee.
Carol Roth is a full-time marketing copywriter and the primary music journalist and social media publicist for Adventures in Americana. In addition to studying the guitar and songwriting, Carol’s additional creative side hustle is writing self-proclaimed “trashy” novels under the pseudonym T.A. Berkeley!
