Written by Landowner bandleader Dan Shaw is a professional when it comes to inventing within constraints. In his work as a landscape architect, he designs public spaces and parks, balancing his aesthetic and community-oriented goals with the usual obstacles, like limited budgets and neighborhood concerns. Every choice has its trade-offs: Dream too big and the project will flunk its aseptic requirements. Outline too rigid a plan and it won’t serve the needs of the future. Above all else, balance your assumptions with a fact-check before you act on them, lest the project collapse before the finish line.
It’s only natural this philosophy extends to his post-punk project, too, where Shaw has spent the past decade thriving under self-imposed musical limitations. When Landowner started in 2015 as a solo endeavor, Shaw would open a new file, choose a drum machine pattern, and write a caricature of a hardcore song sans distortion. That songwriting technique led to his own prickly yet tasteful spin on post-punk. While his peers aimed to achieve maximum tension by barking about capitalism over jabbing, if not outright obnoxious, guitars, Shaw scrapped layer after layer—distortion pedals, crash cymbals, eventually the drum machine itself—to crystalize his band’s own sound. Landowner have since evolved into a five-piece act, and on their fifth album, Assumption, Shaw and his bandmates continue to give modern post-punk a facelift with their minimalist, quick-thinking precision.
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At first, Assumption opens like it will be more of the same—here we go again, white guys with angular guitars. As the title track goes on, though, their jittery post-punk reveals new layers; it’s quite spacious, and within those gaps they tuck away a horn-like synth swell and distant overheard conversations. The rest of the album continues to subvert expectations by reeling in its anxieties instead of blurting them out. In their cleaned-up songs, Landowner rediscover the natural grit of rock that birthed punk and hardcore: Elliot Hughes and Jeff Gilmartin’s bratty guitar strumming in the verses of “Bow to Your Superior” splinter into a chorus of continuous fission, and Joshua Owsley’s gurgling bass line in “Enemy Attack” is a mad dash through 1970s Britain. Midway through the album, the organized tension of “Parapet Wall” is so dignified that it almost passes for Drive Like Jehu. In choosing to abstain from noisy pedal effects and clanging cymbals, Landowner whip up far more entrancing patterns that thrive in the tidiness.
One of the biggest constraints Landowner introduced when recording Assumption was relieving drummer Josh Daniel of his longtime producer duties. Instead, they hiked to Brett Nagafuchi’s remote Vermont cabin-turned-recording studio in a field of wildflowers and played off his suggestions as lead engineer. There, they captured the tension inherent to their live shows, manipulated the recording into an art piece, and wiped it down with Windex. Bass and drums were tracked live in studio; no longer splitting his attention, Daniel focused deeper on his drumming techniques, evidenced by the relentless rhythms of “Rival Males” and the creeping opening of a hi-hat on “Normal Returns to Normal.” Guitars, however, were recorded at home directly into a computer, trimmed with digital shears, and then sent to Nagafuchi, who ran the audio signal through Landowner’s personal amplifiers in his studio and mic’d up the room. Consider it mechanically manipulated punk, able to dart more precisely through an agility course. Several weeks later, Landowner returned to the studio to re-record a handful of those songs—hence Assumption’s dual sensations of precise movement and caffeinated energy.
Post-punk bands face few gauntlets as arduous as the slow song, and Landowner challenge themselves to traverse three of them. The first, “Expensive Rent,” spins slowly around a recurring triplet in a dreary yet romantic waltz. Then comes “Uninhabitable,” which slinks mysteriously through a soft fog like Slint. Shaw’s visions of cracked picture frames and limited supplies in a country teetering on war—by bombs or climate, it’s unclear—verge on prophetic; his takeaway is that assuming young people will endure catastrophes only ensures they’re subjected to some measure of dread, regardless of whether the paranoid fantasies bear out in reality. Later, on “Slippery Abyss,” Landowner push that moral into clear view, as the track’s quick pulse trades off with solemn passages. In those moments of musical tightrope walking, Landowner exemplify how constraints can produce creativity, so long as you’re up to the challenge.
