High Window’s debut album, Benighted & Delighted, has been a long time coming.
You could say Keith Dixon has been working towards it his whole life.
From the age of five, the New Yorker began playing the musical instruments thrust upon him by his parents. “At the time I kinda hated it, it felt like work,” he remembers.
Growing up in the ’80s, a musical child enveloped by the MTV era, he fell in love with bands like The Jesus And Mary Chain and The Cure. The sound of roaring guitars particularly appealed. “It makes the hair stand up on my arms when you get that perfect harmonic shriek,” he says today.
By the time he reached his 20s, Dixon realised all that practicing on all that gear from his parents had paid off. He could play every instrument in a band: drums, rhythm guitar, lead guitar, keyboards, and bass. When a friend told him about multi-track recording, he bought a four-track Tascam and began teaching himself to record and engineer. That was the mid-90s.
The Covid pandemic proved to be the final step. During lockdown Dixon put that same childhood focus on honing his Logic Pro X skills. Benighted & Delighted is the result.
“It’s pretty humbling to see how much the digital tools have made possible for me — without them I’d never have been able to make this album.”
And what an album it is. Of course that beloved harmonic guitar shriek is present and accounted for. So is the influence of the Reid brothers and Robert Smith. But this is not nostalgia. This is not pastiche. With High Window, Dixon has used familiar elements sometimes associated with shoegaze — the gauzy vocals, the wash of guitars, the six-string bass as lead, the subtle but essential piano-style keyboards — and crafted nine extremely confident, nuanced, and personal songs.
On The Far Side Of A Bright Line opens the collection, balancing light and shade, with a jangly guitar riff that underpins the brooding verses, before a glorious wall of vocals signals a soaring chorus with those roaring guitars. Current single Just The Same initially seems understated, despite some inspired call-and-response vocals, but also transforms into a chorus as anthemic as it is memorable. There’s even room for a tight guitar solo and a suitably dreamy choir of voices (all Dixon, of course) that contribute to a dark, but not depressing, mood.
Album highlight Thresher Park — complete with handclaps, deceptively simple keyboard motif, and a particularly beautiful vocal — trades in brightness and immediacy. The ebb and flow of Your Kind Of Blue adds a thrilling guitar solo and pretty swathe of backing vocals to the mix, while the considered, understated Patience Game — twisty guitars delicately intertwined with keys — is the closest Benighted & Delighted comes to a ballad. The direct, driving Fly Walk Crawl, in turn, is the closest Benighted & Delighted comes to an all-out rock song.
The alternately frenetic and atmospheric You Never Will Ask Why initially teems with anxiety before finding some peace and, ultimately, acquiring a real sense of urgency. And album closer Hope Is Heavy rises and falls in volume and intensity as it steadily builds towards a fittingly visceral solo that wouldn’t seem out of place on The Cure’s Pornography album. Musically one of the most nuanced songs here, complete with an earlier guitar solo that’s all about texture, it highlights Dixon’s attention to sonic detail. Mastered by Andy “Hippy” Baldwin at Metropolis Studios, this is a real headphone album that reveals more of itself with each listen.
That’s equally true of the vocals; despite their sometimes ethereal sound, Dixon’s definitely not trying to hide naff lyrics. “There’s a lot of trying to find dignity in failures in my lyrics,” he reveals. “I’m in this stage of life where I’m seeing that a lot of life is about failing but not giving up. Even if you never succeed, there’s a lot of dignity and excitement in the attempt itself.”
So, if you’re willing to take the time (or read the lyrics on the band’s website) there are lines like this to discover: “I used to harm my health with my inhibitions, I used to break my heart on my own conditions, I used to fill my time with unused wishes, Now I’m late with lines in new auditions.”
Dixon’s taken a long time to get to Benighted & Delighted, but it’s been worth the wait.
- Listen to the full album here.
- This article originally appeared on Louder Than War.
Nils van der Linden 