When most people think of post-rock, they think of chiming guitars, meditative passages that stretch into long, long passages in which the tonal center hovers in a sweet spot, evolving slowly like the best of minimalism. Foxhole doesn’t follow many of those rules. Sure, there might be a little chiming, clean tone guitar on the group’s latest single, “Count Basie and His Daughter’s Shoes” (and, OK, a title that would make the Dadaists proud), but the arrangement feels more like some a post-hardcore group would pull off. The most meditative moments are countered by passages of noisy and unsettling hard rock while gorgeous horn lines swirl in the air.
Then again, Foxhole has never done anything by the book. The upcoming LP Well Kept Thing (out September 28 via Burnt Toast Vinyl) has been 12 years in the making. Written in that span of time across five states and three countries, the record tells the tale of a group of friends growing up and growing apart while also striving to keep the one thing that absolutely bonds them, their music, a reality.
Discussing this new single, the band stated: “The rhythmic seed for “Count Basie and His Daughter’s Shoes”, a sampling of 1930s era big bands, cut, shifted and reversed beyond recognition, was born in the same small coffee shop where Foxhole cut their teeth; nearly two decades later, it’s now owned by a band member and serves as de facto HQ for the group. The three-act structure of the song takes listeners from a post-apocalyptic speed-racer vibe to a melodic interlude with soaring trumpets recorded in a pond-side cabin in rural Massachusetts, bridging the dissonance of the intro with the quiet, resolved meditation of the end. As far as what Count Basie himself had to do with any of it, that particular motivation has long receded from memory.”