Grab your towel, your best shampoo and your singing voice before you hit the showers. Haim’s sophomore album “Something to Tell You” is best listened to while singing into a shampoo bottle with some suds in your eyes.
Not that I’ve done it or anything. That’s embarrassing. I’m just making a suggestion.
There’s no other band quite like the sister-fronted California trio Haim, and its versatility is its secret weapon. The indie band has songs that make it on the Billboard’s Hot Rock Songs chart — like “The Wire” from Haim’s 2013 debut album “Days Are Gone” — songs that are played as background music in stores and songs ready for festival-sized sing alongs.
On “Something to Tell You,” released Friday, July 7, the sisters — Este, Danielle and Alana — continue their winning streak, bringing the same sunny melodies as they did on “Days Are Gone.” But as it turns out, with that record the sisters left some things unsaid.
“Some things are long forgotten/Some things were never said,” Danielle Haim sings with a soft tone on opening track and lead single “Want You Back” before the track’s hushed atmosphere erupts into one to tap your foot and sing along to.
“Something to Tell You” is ostensibly a break-up album. But once songs like “You Never Knew” and “Ready for You” are played, the record’s theme refocuses from ending a relationship to expressing a want to communicate with — even if only to move on from — a distant lover, something Haim has touched on in the past with songs like “The Wire.”
On “Kept Me Crying,” Danielle Haim hits the high notes, while an altered vocal sits in the background to add texture to the song. The background vocal reinforces the fact that it is time to go, and the song represents a turning point in the album, where Danielle Haim goes from waiting around to deciding to move on.
The second to last song on the album, “Right Now,” features guitar, piano and Danielle’s voice before mixing in loud, booming noise. Towards its middle, Danielle can be heard regularly speaking, “Somehow it’s so clear now/ What’s that sound?”
“That’s you fading away,” she realizes. This little break in the song helps the listener realize she’s definitely no longer waiting around for her lover to come back.
“Night So Long” is the most somber of all the songs, closing out the album with lyrics that say goodbye to love and the lover that left. “Something to Tell You” begins with someone who is waiting on a lover to come back, and “Night So Long” closes out the album with a goodbye - “I say goodbye to love again/In loneliness my only friend.”
“Something to Tell You” doesn’t disappoint. Filled with great, emotional lyrics, Haim returns with something that was worth waiting four years for.
Also, on a totally unrelated note, Paul Mitchell shampoo bottles make for great microphones, and 42 minute showers are wasteful but worth it.
