This is Medium Rotation, a newsletter about the bands we used to play on my college radio station, 88.3 WSBU-FM, St. Bonaventure. Today, we’re looking back at Brooklyn indie-pop band Hospitality, who are no longer together.
Have you ever listened to R U Talkin’ R.E.M. RE: ME? If you know anything about me, you know that I’m obsessed with it. For the uninitiated, the Comedy Bang Bang! spinoff podcast found Scott Aukerman and Adam Scott, who are extremely funny, devoting upwards of 20 episodes to listening to R.E.M. and talking about how good (or sometimes bad) the band is. When they’re loving a song, they’ll yell about it. In an early episode, either Chronic Town or Murmur, the two hosts just exclaim “fuck!” a bunch of times while indulging in the high jangle of a song; I think it’s “Shaking Through.” It’s hilarious, but it’s also true. When a song is good, it’s expletive-worthy. How in the world are they making that sound? a wise man once sang. As fun as it can be to figure out the answer to that question, it’s infinitely more fun to simply let the mystery be.
This is an extremely roundabout way into “Eighth Avenue,” a song that doesn’t sound much like R.E.M. or Jonathan Richman or Iris DeMent. Instead, it’s uniquely Hospitality, the arty Brooklyn trio that made two near-perfect albums during their six or seven years together. The first one, self-titled, leads off with “Eighth Avenue,” a sonic résumé for a crafty band that made, as Brandon Stosuy wrote in Stereogum in 2009, “pop music that doesn’t take an easy way to a hook.” There’s so much to get lost in about Hospitality’s sound, but on this track, it’s all cannily layered over a simple skeleton so you can feel every new element. First: Amber Papini’s strummy acoustic guitar, Nathan Michel’s easygoing drums, Brian Betancourt’s bass plucks. Then gentle arpeggios, harmonies, a textured chorus leading off with the words “young and maudlin,” and before you know it, an avant-pop freakout bridge that returns as a cyclone of guitar squall to close it all out. Positively delightful. Fuck!
Things began with Papini and Michel, who met at music school, eventually married, and joined with Betancourt in 2007 to form the group they labeled Hospitality. “I guess we liked the name for the band ‘cause it’s sort of anti-rock and roll, anti-angst,” Papini told a culture magazine in 2012. “We always thought we could be like an edgy rock and roll band and have a name like Hospitality, which would juxtapose with the meaning of hospitality, but it turns out our music is kind of friendly sounding, so people think that we’re like twee, and I don’t know, kind of cutesy or something.” This is likely because a large portion of the music media is/was run by men, and men often label things made by women, or even featuring women, as “twee.” Because of Papini’s vocals and slight Glaswegian sensibilities, Hospitality garnered comparisons to Camera Obscura and Belle and Sebastian. They were always way artier. Saxophones are all over their debut LP, often doing things that music critics would call “angular” if they were guitars.
But there are also Papini’s vocal affectations themselves, which aren’t far off from what Joey Ramone or Billie Joe Armstrong did in approximating a British accent to better fit the sound of the band and the melodies. She said she internalized the Mid-Atlantic accent thanks to Julie Andrews movies, which slips out as she tries to fit a ton of story into her songs. It also might be an unintentional cribbing of Robert Pollard, she theorized. It’s neither good nor bad; in fact, it makes up a key component of their sound, a quality immediately welcoming as it likewise attempts to put up just a bit of distance from the listener. Hospitality wouldn’t be quite as hospitable without it. (I am sorry.)
Their earliest release, an EP from 2008, is a readymade greatest-hits package, boasting “Betty Wang,” “Liberal Arts,” “Argonauts,” and “Julie,” all of which later appeared on their 2012 full-length debut. They’re great tunes, expertly crafted and pesky in how memorable they really are. The pretty but slight opener “Half an Apple” has a distinct freak-folk quality, and by the time they muscled up some of those songs for the 2012 debut, they felt more like a proper rock outfit. Papini played fuzzy guitar with purpose, occasionally evoking rigid downtown rhythms (“Friends Of Friends,” “The Birthday”) and yet Hospitality could sound all shimmery like Real Estate (“Sleepover”) and self-titled Velvet Underground (“Betty Wang”). “I’ve been struggling with my instrument since we started playing live. I tried to play with a classical guitar, but the practical realities of a live performance didn’t translate, so I went electric,” Papini told a blog in 2009.
The first Hospitality song I heard wasn’t any of those, though. I was a college senior, afraid to graduate, and “Liberal Arts” began with a real ass-kicking opener — “So you found the lock but not the key that college brings” — before delving into the potential uselessness of an English degree. Naturally, I wallowed in what’s since become such a cliché strain of millennial postgrad malaise that I’m almost embarrassed to say I’d made an entire playlist to help cope. (It’s called “The Slacker Blues.”) That Papini was a schoolteacher before the band took off tickles me, given my higher-education woes, and by her own account, she loved it. “[My students] saw a video that we made, and I remember this little girl watching the video when we were in the classroom and I was standing there, and she kept looking at the screen and looking at me, and looking at the screen and looking at me, and I think it was like ‘Wow!’” she said in 2012. “They kept saying ‘That doesn’t sound like you!’ And the singing, they couldn’t believe that it was my voice. It was funny just to hear their reaction.”
By the time Hospitality was released via Merge in early 2012, some of their songs were several years old. Betancourt had another gig in the band White Rabbits, so he toured with them for a few years before Hospitality regrouped to finally record. “The same time [producer Shane Stoneback] was recording us, he was recording Sleigh Bells I think,” Papini said at the time. (I’m imagining working on “Infinity Guitars” then switching gears for “The Birthday” and smiling deeply.) Hospitality’s song “Friends Of Friends” traveled a bit thanks in part to a kitschy and lovely music video starring some famous funny people like Alia Shawkat, Maria Thayer, Kurt Braunohler, and more. Later that year, their growth as a band was apparent on “The Drift” b/w “Monkey,” a pair of harder-edged tunes that showed them veering away from the sun a bit. Those songs rip, and the outro wobbly guitar lines on “The Drift” point in the direction they were already headed. “I don’t think that people are going to think ‘twee’ when they listen to it,” Papini said.
By the time I saw the band live in September 2014, they were already on the other side of an impressive and darker sophomore album called Trouble. It’s a solid collection that underlines the guitar parts, turns up the crunch, and adds a whole new element to their sound: keyboards. They’re foundational on the sprawling, chilly, and lightly psychedelic “Last Words,” which sounds a lot like 2014 but not a whole lot like Hospitality. And that’s cool. I wish I remembered if they played it during the show, but if Setlist.fm’s logs from that era are accurate, it’s very likely they slotted it in the antepenultimate slot. I bet I loved it! I bet I loved the quiet folk of “Sunship,” too, which often preceded it live. But what I know I loved, and what folks remember most from the Trouble era, is “I Miss Your Bones,” the four-minute Talking-Heads-at-CBGB barnburner that crystallizes in Papini’s repeated title refrain and a feral guitar solo that swallows the back half of the song. It does what “Eighth Avenue” does in a more experimental way, mutating over its brief runtime into flashes of punk and neo-psych. The wild sprays nearly knock the band out of orbit a few times, but Michel and Betancourt stay locked in and allow Papini to go on her own adventure.
“Amber writes all the chords and the melodies as well on the songs. She was really trying to be a bit more atmospheric on this album, and a bit less storytelling,” Michel said around the time of Trouble’s release in 2014. The atmosphere came partially thanks to producer Matt Boynton, who also worked with Kurt Vile and MGMT. “He was mixing things very dark,” she said. That mix landed “I Miss Your Bones” on Time’s best songs of the 2010s list alongside pop heavyweights like Taylor Swift, Robyn, and Adele. Shortly after its release, Papini and Michel relocated to Charleston, South Carolina and are now raising a family together and working as music educators. Betancourt has recently collaborated with Sam Evian, Mary Timony, and even Oscar Isaac. It doesn’t sound like Hospitality ever really broke up, but it would be inaccurate to call them “active.”
“We haven’t been super active as a band in four or five years,” Michel told Charleston’s City Paper in 2019 when the Time list dropped. “We used to get on end-of-the-year lists, but since we haven’t done much in a while, it’s fun to get back into that world.”
I’m choosing to believe that a third Hospitality album is still a possibility. Maybe if that happens, they can open a gig for Camera Obscura. If the timelines work out, throw Alvvays on the bill, too. Talk about a dream show. “Eighth Avenue,” “Lloyd, I’m Ready To Be Heartbroken,” and “Archie, Marry Me” in the same night? Fuck!
ABOVE VIDEO: Hospitality perform “Betty Wang” at Stage On Sixth in Austin in 2012. Thanks to Paste for capturing it and preserving it.
STRAY OBSERVATIONS:
Shout out lefty Brian Betancourt for playing a violin bass. I deeply respect the commitment.
Hospitality, as a four-piece, did a Tiny Desk Concert way back in 2012, when the whole operation was much lower-budget and modest (and worse lit). I watch these early ones occasionally (The Tallest Man On Earth and Wye Oak especially) to remind myself of that golden era online when video didn’t have to look immaculate and could just exist to be appreciated.
Here’s what Papini said ahead of Trouble’s release: “The ocean isn’t meant for people. We aren’t supposed to be there, and some of the animals that live there are much bigger and faster than we are in the water. I think a lot of the songs deal with this out-of-place kind of theme, feelings of unease and the questions of what is under you or what surrounds you.” Thinking about that first part of her statement for, oh, no reason at all.
UNTIL NEXT TIME: Watch Hospitality tear into “I Miss Your Bones” for a KEXP session published exactly seven years ago this week.
Dude. Miss. This. Band! And ready for a reunion/continuation. The self-titled was thee most important new release to me in 2012 and I feel fortunate to have caught them at Spaceland on the tour for it (with Vincent Gallo in attendance no less). It was definitely a college radio staple at the station I volunteered at and as a whole, felt so effortless.