Back when I was covering the Columbus music scene, Way Yes — who played Afropop-influenced electronic pop with shades of Animal Collective and Vampire Weekend among other buzz-band forebears — were one of my favorite local bands. Sometimes those treasures from your home city remain buried within local lore, but Way Yes made it far enough outside of their localized bubble to be covered on this website long before I worked here.
The band has been kaput for several years now; we've sometimes shared great Weezer-ish fuzz-pop from drummer Tim Horak's band Van Dale and solo work from co-frontman Glenn Davis, who remains active as an audio engineer. Now comes an offering from the band's other main singer-songwriter, Travis Hall.
Under the name Tarvin Hill, Hall just released his debut album True Hill. Covering 10 songs in about half an hour, it's a record of woozily intimate bedroom-pop and grungy guitar music with some well-deployed electronic elements. Parts of it remind me of bands like Hovvdy, Duster, Sparklehorse, and Toro y Moi, and of course if you were into Way Yes there are plenty of echoes of that band in here too. On an album that I expected to be mostly about vibes and atmospherics, Hall's lyrics stand out as a major strength; the one about not being sure if his coworkers are real drew me in and cracked me up.
True Hill is available to stream on your usual DSPs, but the whole album is also set to a "workout video" on YouTube, which you can check out below.
True Hill is out now.
