Her’s – ‘Carry the Doubt’

“This one’s a bit of a ballad,” says Stephen, his last word resounding lightly against seemingly sentient walls of the West Berlin basement that is Maze. The crowd hushes with deliberate focus that transcends that of simple courtesy and heaps on a dollop of raw awe.

I watch through a canopy of six-foot silhouettes as long-tailed bird calls and castanet clicks beckon forth the duo’s palm-beached prophecy. Shrouded in surf, sounding of serenade, yet squarely somber, the omniscient Her’s tell of a 50% bittersweet coming of age. Aptly following ‘If You Know What’s Right”s contemplative tension between passion and home, between the adventurous leaps of faith and the comforting grounds of fraternity, ‘Carry the Doubt’ follows our mystical Invitation to Her’s protagonist(s) through their acceptance of a #neutralgood life.

Though our once-naïve Her’s duo still dips into their trademark boyish endearment of corduroys and anti-hide-and-seek audio conspiracies on cathartic tracks such as ‘Low Beam’, they have assuredly found a part-time past-time passion as a modern-day two-piece Greek Chorus. Donning the weighty gilded garb of good ol’ dramatic irony in ‘Carry the Doubt,’ our Her’s boys narrate with a sprig of deja vu in one hand and a whoopie cushion of half-filled satire in the other; “you have a whole new world / open their eyes,” they say, echoing the nefarious opulence of Jasmin and Aladdin’s short-lived financially spurred happiness.

“But what does it mean??” I asked a fellow Her’s fangirl last night, launching into simultaneous symbolic analysis and existential introspection on a late-night transatlantic phone call. “Regret,” is what we settled on—that which aptly ends in a minor tonality, echoing the lieds of forefather tragists Schumann and Schubert; that which blends a best friend’s advice and a worst enemy’s disdain into a pristinely flavored yet dreadfully thick milkshake of wisdom; that which laughs in the face of Babylon but can’t help looking back towards the rubber-necked pillar of salt.

But don’t take my academically abstruse word for it. See Her’s for yourself, and get caught up in their lovely theme park of hard-hitting existential turns and masterfully written melodic counterparts—this Wednesday at The Dome, m’lads. Thank you, you prophetic boys, and see you there xx

Lana