On This Could Be Texas, English Teacher outline a landscape burdened by prejudice, the cost-of-living crisis, mental health issues. The band’s name couldn’t be more apt—it’s here to school us in 50 minutes. They sweep up myriad literary and cultural references and dabble in several genres to dole out endlessly twisting melodies. If a synth flutters into mellow guitar rock, into wandering piano, into drums, out of drums, into layered vocals, with a squeaky guitar on top, you’ve about covered the dextrous three minutes of track one.
This Could Be Texas takes a wider angle than English Teacher’s more personal 2022 EP Polyawkward and 2021 song “R&B,” which gained significant traction online (and is reimagined here). “R&B” harnesses singer Lily Fontaine’s experience as a frontwoman of color (“Despite appearances, I haven’t got the voice for R&B/Even though I’ve seen more Colour Shows than KEXPs”) in service of a larger message. Bouncing between disdain and rage, many of the debut album’s best moments adapt those small, personal pieces that defined Polyawkward and blow them up to fill out a long-player.
English Teacher can’t leave a song alone: Not a track goes by without a twist or complication, whether a time-signature change, an instrumental flourish, or a sudden wall of sound. Those quirks are most effective on “Broken Biscuits,” where Fontaine’s dry tone makes things like government negligence and societal breakdown appear droll rather than devastating. But the energy starts to pick up, and she becomes more insistent. The move between meandering, Jon Brion-esque runs with spots of bright, plunking keys to sudden sped-up sections, where the vocals struggle to keep up, are propulsive: She spits out complaints, places blame, and explodes with anger at uncaring rulers.
Most promising, and core to This Could Be Texas, is the band’s interest in melding indie-prog, rock, folk electronica, and post-punk into a new package. It’s something akin to Black Country, New Road’s Live at Bush Hall: an attempt at massive, epic-scale work, a post-rock entrée with the wingspan of the genre’s greats. And like Bush Hall, it’s a first step in the band’s imagination, hinting toward something more explosive to come.
Take “Not Everybody Gets to Go to Space.” Evoking some Elon Musk-type figure, offhand jokes like “If everybody got to go to space/All of its bars would have a line” seem to fall flat. But as the song progresses to those who did make it to space, the music shifts from spare drums and bass to a rollicking backbeat, pulling in another voice and building into an echoey, bassline-built chasm with overlaid vocals and a persistent melody, blanketed by Fontaine’s shaky yelling. The re-recorded “R&B” is also significantly more intense. As the backing instrumentation ramps up with a stronger bassline and chunkier feel, Fontaine is more forward, too. Separating just the slightest bit from the impulse to speak-sing, she sounds more in control of the song. Like much of the album, it’s full of “I ams” and “I’m nots,” culminating in a question: “If I have stuff to write, then why don’t I just write it for me?”
