Ruen Brothers Awooo
The Ruen Brothers are Rupert and Henry Stansall of Scunthorpe, and now settled in Louisville.
On their fourth album Awooo, the brothers have created a sparse and sparing world. To share it, here’s what you need: Two speakers. A lonely room. Nighttime, preferably with a hint of cold. Approximately thirty-three minutes. And eyes open to the details of their ocean (“Transatlantic Nights”) and Western (“Desert Showers”) and domestic (“Sticks & Stones”) nocturnes.
Henry’s voice echoes in the first note of “Can You Face the Water,” as if over the water he sings about to confess, “I used to love life, darling. Now I, Now I never . . . .” Meanwhile, Rupert’s production unfolds around the question of whether love can withstand this depth of sorrow and its building pressure.
Across these eleven songs, the monochromatic interplay of light and dark covering the album visually comes to life between the twee-folk-pop of late-aughts indie folk, between the orchestral rumbling made from organs and cellos and synthesizers and so much more, between the soft and Chopinesque piano strikes, and between the waves of the desert tremolos.
This wholly built world takes its name from a background-vocal-turned-train-whistle that the narrator in “Sitting at the Station” is waiting on with a red coat and the blackberries from the summer garden. It’s not clear the train will bring the person he waits on. It’s almost certain it won’t. The presence of the things of their life together signal the partner’s absence.
Among these movements of presence and absence–or between dry and wet, light and dark—there is no doubt that electricity courses and occasionally comes ungrounded, as on “Poison Down the Wire.” The back-beat and some-kind-of-synthesized theremin-sounding-thing goes straight into the chorus, inviting, “Would you like to stay up talking late? Kill a lonely hour, poison down the wire? Be it love or hate. Tell me stories till you tire. Poison down the wire.”
Catching up is a happy and a bitter thing, and on Awooo, the Ruen Brothers capture it all, how loneliness can be charged, how another body so easily feels ghastly, how close we are to everything when we’re close to nothing.
Awooo is out October 17th on Yep Roc Records. You can grab your copy here. Rupert and Henry Stansall wrote all the songs on Awooo except “Mama Don’t,” which was written by J.J. Cale. The brothers engineered and performed all songs. Henry played acoustic guitar, glockenspiel and other percussion while leading the album’s vocals. Rupert played everything else—guitars, pianos, synthesizer, organ, percussion, ukulele, strings, glockenspiel, strings, programming, sound effects, and background vocals—and took on production, mixing, and mastering duties across the album.
