(No cover artist credited)
Style: progressive rock, art rock, post-rock (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Black Country New Road, Mother Falcon, Slint, Pixies
Country: United Kingdom
Release date: 22 February 2025
Of all the infamously terrible, “so bad it’s good” albums throughout music history, few have a story as fascinatingly tragicomic as The Shaggs‘ Philosophy of the World. The band was composed of three sisters with zero musical training who were abruptly handed guitars and drums and forced into making an album by their overbearing father in an effort to fulfill a palm-reading prophecy (yes, really). The end result was, predictably, an incompetent, untuned mess with an incomprehensible sense of rhythm, yet there was something about its utter naivete about the very basics of music that was uniquely charming, and it would garner such high-profile admirers as Frank Zappa and Kurt Cobain over the years. Even now, songs such as “My Pal Foot Foot” are inspiring new artists, including a certain group of musicians from Bristol who named their band after the song, and not, as some might suppose, a foot fetish or a disdain for the metric system. Can they recreate the same level of charm as their namesake disasterpiece on debut still waters, empty house, minus the “disaster” part?
Ironically, for a band named after a group whose draw largely lay in their complete disconnect from any recognizable musical influences, foot foot draw their sound from a very specific time and place. Namely, they are a clear product of the “Windmill Scene”, the pack of erratic British post-punk bands such as Black Country New Road, black midi, and Squid that changed the lives of an entire generation of terminally online music nerds. Among those, they sit close to the BCNR end of the spectrum, with a predilection for languid yet emotionally driven post-rock buildups broken up by interjections of dissonant chaos, combined with lush orchestrations offering plenty of sax and violin. However, foot foot has a vibe all their own, largely due to Esther Pollock’s vocals. In stark contrast to, say, the anguished emotionality of Isaac Wood or the rapid-fire mania of Geordie Greep, Pollock’s voice is hushed and feather-light throughout, with a flat, distant affectation that feels more and more uncanny as the music behind her grows increasingly unsettled. Her floaty, indie-girl whisper singing comes off as a hollow facade of pleasantness, never once raising its intensity even over the shapeshifting, dissonant riffs of “Rivers Phoenix/Macaulay Culkin” or the frenetic, nervy rhythms of “Crawl Ball”. It makes for a hauntingly effective contrast, especially given the lyrics that touch upon abandonment, depression, and codependency.
Overall, still waters, empty house feels like a dream, for both good and ill. It’s sometimes ethereally beautiful, sometimes ugly and frightful, but beneath it all there’s an undercurrent of unreality, like it’ll all stop making sense if you look at it too closely. Even in its calmer moments, such as the otherwise straightforward indie rock of “Army Wives” and the soft ballad “Everyman”, something about the harmony feels wrong, with just enough dissonance that it feels like looking at your bedside lamp and realizing it’s not casting any shadows. And yet, there are moments where these clouds of harmonic uncertainty part and let a gorgeous ray of musical sunlight through, and it’s an absolute revelation. Take, for instance, the downright euphoric cresting wave of strings and percussion that forms the climax of album highlight “Soft Mints”, or the wall of violins and guitar feedback in the aptly titled “Slow Song” that feels as weepingly, monumentally glacial as a melting Arctic ice sheet. Sam Greenwood’s violin work in particular sets the tone excellently throughout, leading the way through gentle, serene melodies, manic bursts of energy, and everything in between.
Unfortunately, foot foot do have a few awkward stumbling blocks that keep still waters, empty house from becoming a true RYM-core classic. My biggest problem with the album comes with its occasionally excessive and clumsy implementation of its more chaotic passages. For music like this, dissonance is like cumin—a useful spice, but one that can easily overpower the whole dish if not used in moderation, and for the most part the band seems to understand that. However, there are a few places where they go overboard, most egregiously in opener “Haberdashery” where Evo Ethel delivers a truly wretched saxophone solo, a blast of nonsensical squawking that sounds like Ornette Coleman choking to death while giving fellatio to a balloon animal. And while they can certainly play their instruments, there is a bit of The Shaggs in how loose and occasionally sloppy the band are in matching their rhythms with one another. Sometimes this comes off as refreshingly organic, like in “Soft Mints” where Jesse Pollock’s ever-so-slightly out of time bass lends the music a giddy, heartbeat-skipping feel. In “Rivers Phoenix/Macaulay Culkin”, though, when the rhythm section is left alone to play a menacing odd-meter riff between louder, more cacophonous passages, their frustratingly inconsistent pocket ends up sapping the momentum in places where a tighter groove would have added to it greatly.
The hard part about numerical scores like the one below is they only give an album’s mean quality, with no information on its variance. Most of the time, when an album gets this score, it’s a safe, inoffensive listen that manages “pretty good” but fails to strive for anything greater. still waters, empty house is the exact opposite, a pendulum chaotically swinging about three points in either direction between the transcendent and the grating. Like their namesake, foot foot have found a sound that, perhaps unintentionally, blends elements of genius and incompetence. However, they’ve flipped the ratio on its head; while Philosophy of the World was a record mostly composed of garbage elevated by glimmers of accidental brilliance, foot foot have made a generally very strong album whose few yet crucial flaws hold it back from greatness. Perhaps more than most records we review here, though, still waters, empty house shows immense potential; if the band can clean up the messy spots in their musicianship and hone in on the vein of potent emotions they’ve already begun to mine, they’ll make something truly special. I don’t need a palm reading to tell me that much.
Recommended tracks: Soft Mints, Slow Song
You may also like: Cime, Eunuchs, The Sonora Pine, Henry Cow
Final verdict: 6.5/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
foot foot is:
– Esther Pollock (vocals, guitars)
– Jesse Pollock (bass)
– Llyr Cox (drums, cello)
– Sam Greenwood (violin)
– Evo Ethel (saxophone)
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