A few months back, Lord Huron announced a relatively modest run of shows to celebrate the 10th anniversary of their breakout sophomore album, Strange Trails. On Friday, they removed the “relatively modest” part of that equation by adding a load of dates to the tour, including a July 23 stop at the Miller High Life Theatre in Milwaukee.
If you’ve never heard Strange Trails, the accessible oddness of it is perhaps best represented by the fact that two of its songs (“Love Like Ghosts” and “Meet Me in the Woods”) use quite literally the exact same melody — something you think you’d notice on first listen. Maybe I’m particularly thick-headed, but after discovering Lord Huron through this album years ago, I recall it taking a few trips through Strange Trails for me to realize the copycat tracks.
Perhaps it’s because one sounds like something a supernatural cowboy would sing while riding through a graveyard while the other could slide it right into your favorite indie dance party playlist.
It was a curiously confident maneuver from a band in the early stages of their career. Then again, Lord Huron (and frontman/primary songwriter Ben Schneider) have never seemed terribly interested in doing the expected.
“Strange Trails was out in some sort of fictional or supernatural place, and then Vide Noir was kind of cosmic as well as very internal,” Schneider told The Rodeo, referring to the band’s third record. “To me, that album is all about how those spaces are equally huge: What’s out there is huge, what’s in [our minds] is just as huge in the other direction.
“And then I guess for Long Lost [album No. 4], it felt like we wanted to put both feet into reality for once — the real world, which is just as complicated and weird as those other places. So yeah, there’s an element of realism in the storytelling on this record that was really just the nature of the type of story we’re trying to tell.”
Of course, Lord Huron’s version of realism in the case of Long Lost was writing songs from the perspective of a fictional group of “old showbiz folks” who previously occupied the band’s refurbished Whispering Pines studio space. The album was just as spectral and spacey and supernatural as Strange Trails, demonstrating that the band has a realm it likes to occupy but isn’t afraid to push out its borders from one record to the next.
You can revel in Lord Huron’s creatively constructed universe when they visit the Miller High Life Theatre on July 23. Tickets go on sale to the general public at 10 a.m. next Friday, Jan. 31, online and at the Pabst/Riverside box offices.
