When people play a genre of music that predates them, sounds nothing like other bands in town, and is all but guaranteed to make them no money, people take note. Yorba Linda is the second full-length album by Huak, and it's the best local record that fits these criteria I've heard in a long while.Huak's musical contemporaries are bands like the Party of Helicopters, Drive Like Jehu, or Circus Lupus. These are obscure, sure, but I don't evoke them as a point of snobbery or cultishness. It's important to note that the type of music Huak are interested in has a history, and that history is neither local nor recent. Those bands (to name just a few) were scattered across the country, released two or three records at the most, and broke up 10 to 20 years ago. Why Huak seem so inspired by a foregone genre I won't pretend to know, but the fact that they do makes them one of the most compelling, trustworthy, and interesting bands in Portland.
And what'll make Yorba Linda an important record in Portland history is that it makes that past exciting again. The 10-song, 38-minute record takes the spoiling fruits of late-era punk rock — an ailing, outsized forum to say the least — and makes from them a terrific, triumphant pie.
All genre-work has its trademarks, and the traditions of post-punk are here in spades. Coiled, dissonant guitars. Vague, evocative lyrics. Elliptical, cut-and-paste song structure. Huak observe these and beyond, but Yorba Linda is more than a careful adherence to form. What makes it vital are the band's strange, bold, and thoroughly original adaptations.
As a complex punk band, Huak have also drawn a lot of comparisons to Fugazi. It's a ballpark reference at best (Huak are way less concerned with sustained melodies or dub rhythms), but the bands do share an important trait. One of Fugazi's major strengths was the interplay of their two guitarists. One strummed; the other slashed. Huak's guitars work similarly: Jake Lowry hammers out a tonic riff — angular and discordant but meaty and repeatable — and over a few minutes, Joel Glidden layers it with so much stabbing, emphatic color that by the end of the song, it's fundamentally changed.
Along the way, Huak's songs undergo a ton of interesting contortions, propelled largely by one of the busiest rhythm sections in Portland. The vocals, shared by guitarists Lowry and Glidden, are raw, cryptic, and off-key. The couplets never rhyme. Meter seldom matches. It's tricky to sing along. Most songs are arranged in two or three disjointed sections; some never revisit the opening riff. Where most rock songs are anchored by a hook or a chorus, Huak's are sustained by energy and tempo.
One of their primary songwriting tools — present on their debut Trajectory but far more effective here — is what I mentally refer to as "the spazz-out moment," where the tensions of the guitars, the relentless skittering pulse of the drumming collapses, the band unites in a brief instrumental peak, and the song inverts itself. Huak do this a lot, and it works.
