August are theoretically an art-rock band, hypothetically a pop group. Geographically? Quite the admin nightmare. With origins split between New York, Bermuda, Sheffield, Essex and Devon, the five-piece have spent their past year dragging their self-described “no-seconds-wasted medicine show” around London, slowly but surely gathering the kind of following already capable of singing along, despite having no songs available to stream.
Searching for August online is a lost cause. There’s no streaming profile, no recorded music in the public sphere, and virtually no biographical evidence of their existence, beyond the fact that five people are definitely involved. Even their debut EP August (Live From The Horse Hospital) reaches us exclusively via private Soundcloud link, otherwise kept behind a password obtained from the band’s mailing list. But for those willing to find it, the EP offers the very first officially recorded notes of a reputation built almost entirely within small venues.
I caught August headlining The George Tavern on 13th August, three nights before they returned for an Elliott Smith tribute show there, alongside familiar names like mary in the junkyard, Beabadoobee, and The Last Dinner Party’s Abigail Morris. August’s arrangements stretch and buckle according to the temperature of the room: moments of composure retain the suspicion that something darker and far less house-trained is waiting in the wings to turn feral.
Recorded across the 2nd and 3rd of June of this year, ‘Live From The Horse Hospital’ quite cleverly leaves that chaos entirely intact. Four credited “Intro Ghosts” open proceedings, beginning with mary in the junkyard’s Clari Freeman-Taylor, who offers the slightly ominous assurance that this is, indeed, a live recording. Another ghost then confirms that the original compositions which follow were recorded “over two hours, across two days, in front of…people.” It feels like a very formal declaration made on behalf of a band who are clearly having none of that. “This is August, live at The Horse Hospital,” the ghosts conclude, before descending directly into ‘Pellmell’.
Even the EP’s accompanying materials resemble the programme for some homemade gothic pageant, with its lyrics scrawled out by hand on the band’s website (if you have the password, that is). The credits are no more conventional: alongside lead vocals and four guitars, frontman August Janklow is responsible for “set paintings”; Patraic O’Donnell contributes first-chair guitar and a “winning smile”; whilst Rory Wilson keyboards and “pained whines”. The company extends to violin, cello, “responsible adults” and a guitar technician doubling as psychiatrist. Lou Reed receives a special thank-you. His precise involvement remains, for the now, unexplained.
‘Pinkopolis’ provides the first truly rakish moment, swaggering in with a crunchy guitar riff, with something of the frayed 70’s bravado of God’s-Favourite-Customer era Father John Misty. The riff circles for much of the track and, somehow, never gets tired. Instead, it gives the song something to cling to as everything else starts misbehaving. By the closing passage, guitars crunchily scrape against one another and the whole song sounds as if it were somehow shedding pieces of itself. August do this a lot across the EP, but their control lies decisively in knowing exactly how long to remain within their all-too-satisfying chaos.
‘Ear’ eases off a little, allowing the piano and strings to grow out slightly from beneath the guitars. The strings provide something mildly more uneasy than a decorative, pretty swell, bringing a dark, slightly eerie chamber sound to a song lyrically preoccupied with failed communication. Janklow listens “twice as hard” with his favourite ear, whilst imagining how to control a “third hand.” The repeated question “If I stay later, do I get a prize” or “an extra night?” makes borrowed time sound like something still up for negotiation.
Time behaves poorly throughout the entire EP. Seasons change, clocks turn, people disappear, and entire cities collapse onto plates of entrées. ‘Pellmell’ begins with trees shedding their skin, before arriving at the problem which looms over much of the record: “Do the leaves have to change? // Can things stay the same?” Janklow rarely spells any of this out explicitly. Instead, mice and smiling spiders do much of the worrying for him, whilst dogs offer comfort and hair is left behind in boxes. There is something of Sparklehorse in the way that these slightly strange images can still be devastating.
‘Such Great Dogs Around,’ is thankfully a little more comforting, even if darkness still shakes the branches overhead and the family SUVs look rather bleak, but the dogs are enough to keep the worst of it at bay.
‘Freelancer’ is harder to place. It is never quite clear who Janklow is singing to: a lover, perhaps, or something closer to a hostile god. “You are so far away” becomes “not far enough”, and soon unease blows open into ancient soldiers and fire raining down in the distance. It follows the unfamiliar route of a half-forgotten nightmare, where the details keep changing, but the feeling of perpetual dread remains.
‘Dirt’ opens with Janklow getting “war in my eye” and being unable to tell whether it is actually there, or whether his vision has simply gone wrong. From there, a romance is rendered on the scale of Ancient Rome. He insists that he “always make[s] the best of it”, but by the time he is trying to comprehend how “the cows, the grass and myself will all end up as dirt,” that optimism becomes increasingly frantic. The song erupts, then burns itself out.
Then follows almost two minutes of silence.
Stay put, and the audience begins demanding one more song. August oblige, with a loose, but unexpectedly tender cover of ‘Satellite of Love’. At last, Lou Reed’s credit makes a bit more sense.
But it is more than just a hidden inside joke. For a record so preoccupied with distance and time passing, ‘Live From The Horse Hospital’ is unabashedly crowded: five fixed band members, two string players, four ghosts, assorted adults, and an audience held there, singing and hollering back at them. August could have introduced themselves through a controlled studio release. Thankfully, they didn’t. Even when everything must eventually become dirt, for two nights in London in early June, there were people in a room. Listening.
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