Caddywhompus

On their third album, the New Orleans duo master their omnivorous style, which ranges from hectic noise rock to jangling ambience to arena riffage—sometimes within the span of a single song.

In a culture that praises overnight fame and craves an endless stream of hits, the difficult, awkward path known as The Long Road to Success always loses travelers. Why bother with unpaid gigs, cramped tour vans, sleeping on floors, and saving up for studio time when you can easily polish a song at home and let the internet sort out your fate? There’s no shame in the latter route, but there’s something ineffably sweeter about witnessing a beloved underdog mature and pick up steam in real time. Just ask the rabid fans of Caddywhompus, a band that, nine years into their career, has released their most important album.

Caddywhompus is the New Orleans-based duo of singer/guitarist Chris Rehm and drummer Sean Hart, friends who have known each other since kindergarten in Houston, Texas, and have played music together since middle school. They’ll cite early inspirations like Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and Radiohead as soon as they’ll describe formative experiences with A Minor Forest, Don Caballero, and Explosions in the Sky. Grouper, the Caretaker, Vashti Bunyan, Roy Orbison, and Liz Phair sit side by side on their mixtapes. And the music Rehm and Hart write as Caddywhompus reflects their omnivorous musical appetites.

As far back as their 2010 debut LP, Remainder, the pair have mulched the contents of their iPods into a chirping, spazzy noise-rock that’s equally unhinged and pop literate. Rehm’s voice falls into the strange timbre of twerpish falsettos that rattle the bones—like Avey Tare’s yawps tamed by, say, Thom Yorke impersonating Ezra Koenig. The duo’s inclusive sound took on a new wrinkle with 2011’s The Weight EP, when they allowed themselves breathing room between bouts of erratic shredding. Three years later, the impressive Feathering a Nest diverged more frequently from angular riffs and punk tempos into post-rock’s shimmering vistas.

The third Caddywhompus album, Odd Hours, is the refined culmination of its predecessors; this stylistic tour de force rarely rests at the countless pit stops spread across its 40 minutes. Opener “Decent” kicks off with a whirlwind of proggy emo and pop punk. “Salmon Run” at first recalls OK Computer with its boomy drum kit and spacey guitar, before switching straight into fuzzy power chords and sing-along melodies à la Deerhoof. “Appetite” pulls a bait-and-switch, too, with a jittery bounce, like ’90s-era Modest Mouse, and a massive, galloping riff that could have shown up on Battles’ Mirrored. All this breakneck jamming and juggling can overwhelm, but the atmospheric instrumental “Ferment” and the straightforward “In Ways” offer palate cleansers amid the delirium.

It’s hard not to play connect-the-dots with Odd Hours, but the album is more accomplished than a well-curated grab bag of influences. Because Caddywhompus pulls from everywhere all at once, the flurry of their motions blurs into something unique unto itself. In just over a minute, “Waiting Room” moves from heavy riffing to a lazy waltz to 4/4 power-pop and back again—each transition seamless and unfussy as can be. Yet for all of the band’s remarkable skill and presence, little about them is ostentatious or gratuitous. Behind every hairpin turn and difficult time signature is a gush of effusive candor. Odd Hours is too emotional to be math-rock, too energetic to be post-rock, too structured to be art-rock—there’s no neat categorization for a record this ambidextrous.

On each half of Odd Hours, two varied, complete movements rise and fall with casual precision, the lockstep performance of bandmates with almost a decade’s practice behind them. The whole thing couldn’t exist without the duo’s years upon years spent playing flophouses, unlit basements, local block parties, and cold, uncrowded garages, with breaks to record each road-worn song in whichever buddy’s “studio” is cheap and available. It couldn’t exist without the slow work of cultivating a dedicated audience, fans that share their first experience with the band like a badge of honor. It couldn’t exist without the perseverance of two lifelong friends, who would still be playing these songs whether or not anyone bothered to listen. - Pitchfork

There's an electric thrill to Caddywhompus not heard in too many guitar and drum duos. Where others examine the extremes of the spare or the loud, Chris Rehm (guitar, vocals) and Sean Hart (drums) mine math-rock, frenetic punk and the bombastic end of pop to generate a signature, euphoric sonic boom.

Caddywhompus has announced Odd Hours, its first album in three years, with the lead-off track, "Decent." The New Orleans duo spends the first minute in a melancholic, moody Radiohead mode — but quickly picks up the pace with finger-tapped wizardry, aerobic drumming and Rehm's wild tenor that could scale skyscrapers.

Rehm says that "Decent" is "a song about second tries in a relationship, pondering potential outcomes and attempting to see both sides in order to understand the situation. Coincidentally, it took quite a few tries to get the song written and recorded, and has been an evolving staple in our set for over three years." - NPR

Chris Rehm and Sean Hart gave up on succinctly explaining the sound of Caddywhompus a while ago. “I know we used to call ourselves ‘noise pop,’ and then we were going with ‘avant pop’ for a while,” Rehm says in a phone interview with SPIN. He throws out a whole list of possible tags: Experimental noise rock. Math rock. Psych. Post-rock. Post-punk. None are entirely incorrect, but none quite fit, either.

Rehm, 26, and Hart, 27, are lifelong friends who grew up together in Houston, and now reside in New Orleans. Since 2008, they’ve played together as Caddywhompus, making bright, knotty guitar-and-drums music that zig-zags in every direction at once. It’s noisy—listening to a Caddywhompus song can feel like furiously shaking a can of something carbonated—but no matter how dissonant the build-up, the payoff is clean, aggression-free energy.

The duo’s latest album, Odd Hours, is their fourth full-length, and their third to be conceived as such. Longtime fans will pick up a new level of clarity and refinement in the production. For that, Rehm and Hart credit their friend Ross Farbe, who helped them record. “I recorded and mixed all our previous records, and I have kind of like a self-taught wall-of-noise, super smashed-out, weird recording technique,” Rehm says. “Ross is a little bit more traditional.”

“We brought in Ross ’cause he’s got more of a, in my opinion, Steve Albini kind of feel,” Hart explains. “We really stripped down, and instead of recording, you know, a slew of guitar amps and overdubs, we just did one guitar amp, and one drum set in the room, live, and just spent a lot more time doing a traditional, minimal mic placement. We actually got a bigger sound out of that.”

That bigger, dimensional sound allows Caddywhompus’ psych-pop side to shine through, and Rehm’s vocals surface with newfound clarity. “Repetition takes its toll / It’s on to something new / But if you want / I’ll… wait… for… you,” he sings over a clattering crescendo on “Appetite.” It’s classic Caddywhompus: a sharp, scattershot, tension-filled build-up, followed by a pause and a breath of air. On “Choir,” Rehm and Hart pack an album’s worth of melodic and rhythmic ideas into six minutes, but the structure enforced by a dozen unexpected left turns prevent their squiggly riffs from spiraling out into scribbles.

Another friend of the band, artist Max Seckel, created Odd Hours’ enigmatic cover: A collection of junk and debris—cinderblocks, a bicycle pump—surrounded by skinny trees and hanging Spanish moss, against an alligator warning sign on a chain-link fence and a gradient sunset. Seckel’s vision of beauty and decay, of a hundred pieces of Louisiana swamp flotsam come to rest, felt like the perfect visual accompaniment. “I had, personally, some direction that I was thinking for the album [art], and he just got to a blank canvas and started painting, and came up with that,” Rehm says. “I was like, ‘Yep, I couldn’t have explained this to you.'”

Odd Hours is out April 14 from Inflated Records. It’s streaming in full on SPIN for the week ahead of its release. Listen below. - SPIN

Caddywhompus @ Beerland

There’s two options a duo can take: create intimate, often lo-fi music that builds off personal, cathartic performances; or multiply their sound, creating layers that only seem possible with four people, if not more, in the band. New Orleans duo Caddywhompus takes the latter route. With their instruments—a drum kit and a guitar—facing one another like a standoff, Chris Rehm and Sean Hart debuted songs off their upcoming LP, Odd Hours, that touched on math rock, psych riffs, and freak folk alike. Live, it illuminated the room with tonal similarities to Patagonian Rats-era Tera Melos, James Mercer’s whimsical trills, and the spirited burst of Wolf Parade. In barely half an hour, Caddywhompus created an uplifting blend of experimental sounds and it’s best to assume they will only create more of it in the future. - SPIN

A somber guitar opens the latest single from Chris Rehm and Sean Hart — also known as Caddywhompus — but once the melancholia dies down, “Splinter” erupts into the signature distorted noise rock that the duo does best, while subtle video game-like intricacies lace the background. “Wait for your guard to let himself down/ Fall asleep on the warm ground,” Rehm narrates clearly. There’s a darker shadow cast over “Splinter,” with its buzzy, morose introduction, but the major chord changes and Rehm’s triumphant belts and coos make this song epic. Listen below. - Stereogum

There’s a buoyancy to “Stuck,” the first single from Caddywhompus’ upcoming sophomore full-length, Feathering A Nest. The track inhales and exhales, drawing breath up tight before letting it all loose in a whoosh of air. It sounds restless, unwilling or unable to be pinned down to one idea or sound. Blending a mix of art- and post-rock, the song sets up an off-kilter rhythm, jerking back and forth between exuberant clarity and intricate noise. The New Orleans group is only made up of two guys and it’s amazing how they manage to flesh out their full-bodied instrumentation and build an atmosphere that feels vast and limitless, yet warm and intimate at the same time. Listen below. - Stereogum

New Orleans experimental noise-pop duo Caddywhompus have shown their affinity for fragmentation and complex sound structures on their debut record, Remainder. Their next full-length, Feathering A Nest, might prove to elevate them to a new level of strangeness and sophistication, if the first single is any indicator.

You couldn’t find a less fitting title than “Stuck” for this one, given how strikingly dynamic it is. Press play and the track is immediately in motion, with a steady beat and looping guitar riff laying the groundwork for the startling bursts of instrumentation. Chris Rehm’s voice—so reverberant at times that it sounds like he could have recorded in a church hall—makes flooring melodic leaps. Meanwhile, Sean Hart’s drum work is intricate and precise. The track maintains its coherence throughout shifts between several disparate sections that weave in and out of each other. Starting at about a minute in, the song enters a fuzzy post-rock tunnel, then it emerges into a clearing of clean guitar riffs banded by soft vocal harmonies. From there, it flowers into an array of jazzy chords and ends as suddenly as it began. The effect is pleasantly dizzying.

Feathering A Nest is due out November 11 on Community Records (home to the likes of Designer and Woozy). Hear “Stuck” below. - Impose Magazine

I went certifiably insane for the last/debut Caddywhompus record, REMAINDER. Seriously, there are few records over a year old that still get that much playtime from me. Then two months ago, courtesy of CHINQUAPIN & COMMUNITY Records, they dropped a new single called “AGE OF WILD SPIRITS” and it was killer. Got me totally stoked for the upcoming The Weight, which, just like Remainder is free of charge, meaning you should go DOWNLOAD that shit STAT (or better yet, drop some $$$ on it and hold it IRL). Then when The Weight came around, I discovered it only has 4 songs, one of which we’d already heard. Mega-bummer. BUT WAIT this is Caddy-fuckin-whompus and The Weight is still one of the best mathy noise-pop albums to come out this year so fucking HOORAY.
I don’t really want to recycle the same comparisons from before, but they’re still quite approriate. There’s Zach Hill drum love affairs, Dodos style vocals, the blistering nastiness of Oxes, and fuckit throw in some Deerhoof because what’s a noise-pop review without mention of them. But what makes Caddywhompus BETTER than all of those bands is their absolutely brilliant songwriting, every song being a straightup earworm, and having the best fucking mix of abrasion & bliss. Every song has me simultaneously air drumming & guitaring while flailing uncontrollably during the massive breakdowns, where they’re able to maintain a beautiful pop charm right alongside the thrashing & squawking.
I’m pretty sure The Weight is a step in a slightly more refined Caddywhompus sound, but I honestly can’t tell you what that step is because I’m too fucking distracted by the unmatched awesomeness being laid down. Plus I’m wayyy too busy listening to this to bother to go back and compare it to Remainder. When The Weight is playing, everything else becomes second rate, including previous Caddywhompus records.
I wish there was something, anything I could do to make Caddywhompus stand out even more. They deserve the highest praise and arena sized audiences freaking out to their totally fucking killer anthems. It blows my mind that I’m trying to hype this band because that means they don’t already have it. WTF is wrong with all of you? It is now your duty to tell every goddamn friend of yours about Caddywhompus and make sure they all own a copy of Remainder and The Weight. - Anti-Gravity Bunny

This week, we head deep South to New Orleans, LA where the spritely, gnarly, rip-roaring drum/guitar duo of Caddywhompus humbly resides. Perhaps not so humbly... Caddywhompus is a band that quite possibly has most energy of any other band working on the planet today. I know this because listening to their recent EP, The Weight is like eating ten bowls of Smacks cereal with ten spoonfuls of sugar to match in one sitting. Super sweet, super punchy, power-pop gold. And that headache right after? The best kind possible: dizzy, dreamy, delusional you, all hyped up, hopped up and ready to drive your parents completely bonkers... - Tome To The Weather Machine

I have a friend who uses the term ‘caddywhompus’ occasionally, and after hearing this fucked-up duo for the first time I imagine this is basically what he has in mind when he does so.

Think out-of-whack, as in absurdly unusual. Think of something wild and crazy like Two Gallants meets Modey Lemon on the first song, “Let the Water Hit the Floor,” and you’ve got some idea of both the general sound structure and the type of racket involved in their brand of fractured roots music, dancing with fractured electronics.

Guitarist/singer Chris Rehm and drummer Sean Hart bash and wail their way through this set, in what some people might refer to as a rather unhinged manner; like a couple of talented but unkempt kids finally getting permission to make a lot of noise. The two fractured worlds mesh together well enough that the songs take over and the strange juxtaposition of sounds fades into the background. “Balloon Knot,” which is more or less the centerpiece of the album, is tight and twitchy, and brings along with it a bendy vocal and noisy Pavement-ish guitar buzz. That’s the upside.

The downside of all of this experimenting and jury-rigging of audio is “Congo Half-Mask,” a song which could be like a joyful Captain Beefheart-esque odd-fest. Instead, it’s really just a darn mess. The short closing song, “Same Difference,” is the kind of thing they should work on developing, a minimal, less cluttered, more focused druggy mountain breakdown. I’ll bet when they perform live it’s a song like this that really takes off and flies in its own direction. A packaging note: Next time, please use one of those recycled cardboard pocket-foldover covers instead of jamming the disc and booklet into a cheap plastic sleeve. Thank you. - Impose Magazine

Local noise pop duo Caddywhompus are good at two things: math rock and enthusiasm. They’ll stomp your party to pieces and then put out a beautiful, minimalist guitar song all in the same set. They recently opened for Marnie Stern who, we suspect, may have had some influence on that methodical and hyperactive guitar energy. - Flavorwire

Sean Hart and Chris Rehm have been friends since childhood. Together, as Caddywhompus, they make some of the most engaging experimental pop this side of Merriweather Post Pavilion. While their earliest songs are mostly catchy slices of energetic stoner-pop, their latest EP, The Weight, shows off their most evolved, elaborate avant-garde rock to date. On tracks like “The Weight” and “Age of Wild Spirits,” the duo blend bizarre arrangements, effects-pedal gloom, and lots of shredding. But for all of The Weight’s technical complexity, Caddywhompus radiate juvenile energy. They approach their high-intensity psych-jams with an open-minded, fuck-it-all attitude, and the effect is dizzying. Watch any YouTube video of the pair doing their thing live and it’s pretty clear that they’re just two best friends playing weird pop songs — and making as much noise as they possibly can. - The Boston Phoenix