Hearts of Animals, Human Size

So, a thing happened with quirky, half-smirking/half-serious indie-pop, one-woman “band” Hearts of Animals — I suspect it happened a while ago, maybe even when 2015’s Another Mutation came out, but I guess it didn’t really click for me until listening to Human Size. I like to think I’m pretty perceptive about stuff like this, but hearing Hearts of Animals now makes me want to smack myself in the forehead for being dense…

Basically, what was the solo-with-help-from-friends project of songwriter/guitarist/saxophonist Mlee Marie has become an actual, honest-to-God band. Marie’s long been friends with the guys from the now-defunct Linus Pauling Quartet, contributing vocals, keyboards, and sax to some of the songs on their final handful of releases, and on Mutation they returned the favor, with every member of LP4 showing up at some point and that band’s Stephen Finley engineering and co-producing.

Now, though, the LP4 is no more, leaving the guys free to, well, be Mlee Marie’s band. And I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what happened between Mutation and Human Size, if not before — now guitarist Clint Heider and bassist Finley, along with longtime collaborator Joey Vee Mains on drums and vocals, are part of Hearts of Animals full-time, rather than just as friends helping out another friend.

And yes, this is a very cool thing. The new “band-ness” comes through like a bright, bright light on every damn song here, making the music feel tighter and more thought-out than Mlee’s previous stuff ever felt before. I’ll admit that I’ve liked that looseness, that chaos, quite a bit in the past, but hearing what it sounds like when she’s playing with a handful of other people who are fully meshed with her and with the music? Well…wow. That’s quite a difference.

Beyond that, Human Size is refreshing in terms of how focused it is, stylistically — Marie’s always ridden the edge of folky pop, with bits of psych and rock and more experimental stuff thrown in, but here she and her new(?) bandmates have knuckled down to craft her/their first ever straight-up indie-pop album.

Seriously, about half of the disc sounds like it could’ve been released on Sarah or Slumberland Records back in the early ’90s; see sweet, lilting opener “MARSHA” for proof, with it’s warm boy-girl vocals, or the drifting haze of “Floating Squares,” where Marie’s voice brings to mind Harriet Wheeler of The Sundays, or similarly hazy, ethereal, melancholy tune “Flight,” which makes me think of both Low and underrated band The Secret Stars (never a bad thing), and where Marie declares, “You are flight / and I am fight / and it’s okay, baby.”

Things speed up a bit on the surprisingly ’60s-tinged “Hours,” which brings to mind The Dutchess and The Duke, particularly with the retro-sounding organ and harmony vocals, and the jangly, countrified pop of “Deathwish,” and then the band kicks into overdrive for “Lost In The Translation,” a woozy, speeding blast of fiery, Velocity Girl-esque indie-pop/rock.

The guitars here are superb, just totally great, the organ floating in the background is a nice touch, and Marie’s vocals sound the absolute best they’ve ever been. It’s addictive like an old-school Atomic Fireball, burning your mouth but sending a buzzing burst of cinnamon-and-sugar fire through your veins at the same time.

As a side note, I’ve got to say that it’s wonderful to hear Marie’s vocals these days; back in the day, there used to be a bit of a “broken” quality to her delivery, and while it was definitely endearing, it’s obvious that she’s been seriously working on going beyond that point. With Human Size, she absolutely has, maturing and honing her singing to the point where it’s one of the best things about the album.

Happily, not all of the quirky, weirdo edges have been fully smoothed away here — take “Sex Pond,” for example, which is an odd, jangly little anti-ode to a nearby frog pond disrupting Marie’s nights. Having once lived for several years near a frog breeding ground, by the by, I can totally empathize with Mlee’s pain, and it’s hard not to love the song itself, with its hints of psych-rock peeking in around the edges.

Then there’s the murky, menacing “Cat Karma,” where Marie seemingly warns a killer of cats they’d better not go out after dark or she’ll find him and exact retribution for their crimes. Part of me wants to shake my head and chuckle, but she sounds so goddamn serious that I can’t; when she warns that “these cats will come back someday / and they’ll grow to human size / and they’ll see you as their prey / and scratch out both of your eyes,” I get a freaking chill down my back. (For the record, while I’m extremely allergic to cats, I don’t dislike ’em. Just sayin’.)

Human Size closes out with “Sax Wizard,” which brings me back to the start of this whole thing — it’s a rumbling, stomping, sludgy rock track that sounds very little like anything Hearts of Animals has done before but a whole lot like what the Linus Pauling Quartet dudes used to do (albeit with an added burst of saxophone).

And again, it’s a testament to how HoA has grown and evolved into a “real” band that it works, that it doesn’t sound like a tacked-on one-off that doesn’t really fit here. Hearts of Animals was once just Mlee Marie, but it’s grown into something else, something bigger and better and more fully-fleshed-out than it’s ever sounded before, and holy crap am I loving it. I want to be listening to Hearts of Animals for ever and ever, y’all, I mean it.