Sometimes the argument that the future is getting better does not need a prediction, a chart or a debate. It only needs somebody to press play.
Rat Columns provide another document for the case.
At first, Sceptre Hole sounds familiar enough to place. There are jangling guitars, distant voices, fragile melodies, drum machines and rhythms that remember post-punk, psychedelic pop and the private weather of old independent records. A listener who has spent decades with this music can begin naming ancestors almost immediately. The temptation is to treat recognition as a verdict: this came from there, that sound belongs to this earlier band, and therefore the past remains the original while the present becomes a copy.
But listen longer.
The record does not behave like someone trying to impersonate a vanished era. It behaves like someone who grew up in a world where all those sounds already existed and were available to be loved. David West does not have to pretend the past never happened in order to make something new. He can accept it as inherited material, the same way a guitarist accepts that six strings existed before he arrived.
That is one reason I believe the future can become better than the past. Later artists do not begin at zero. They inherit every previous attempt, including the beautiful mistakes, abandoned possibilities and small regional scenes that were once difficult to reach. They can hear records from cities they have never visited, find obscure singles that survived through somebody’s homemade transfer, and discover that a sound dismissed thirty years earlier contains an unopened door.
The future does not erase the past. It gains access to more of it.
Sceptre Hole moves through that access with unusual freedom. “Eastern Vibrations” begins in slow fog, closer to an imaginary horror soundtrack or damaged transmission than the bright guitar pop that soon follows. The record does not introduce itself with a clean statement of identity. It allows uncertainty into the room first. Voices drift inside drones, and the music seems to be approaching from a distance before “Death Is Leaving Me” suddenly opens the curtains.
That title should feel grim, yet the song moves with almost ridiculous lightness. This is one of Rat Columns’ great little inversions: melancholy does not always require slow motion, and joy does not require emotional simplicity. A guitar can sparkle while the words carry shadows. Rhythm can make the body move while the mind remains somewhere less certain.
David West has described this as a natural attraction to the sad-and-happy condition, and the record repeatedly finds that narrow current. The songs do not solve sadness by covering it with cheerful music. Instead, they allow two realities to occupy the same recording. The melody may know that life is beautiful while the voice knows beauty cannot be kept.
“Flowers” is barely more than two minutes long, but it contains the pleasure of a song that understands exactly how much space it needs. The guitar rings, the rhythm moves forward, and nothing is inflated to convince us of its importance. It passes quickly enough to leave a shape behind. Several songs here work that way. They arrive, establish an atmosphere and disappear before the listener has finished living inside it.
That brevity gives the album the feeling of an old box of photographs whose images do not come from one occasion. A bright exterior scene follows a blurred room. A face appears and vanishes. Something strange has been included without explanation. The sequence is coherent, but its coherence belongs more to memory than conventional storytelling.
The tiny instrumental and transitional pieces make the album stranger. “P.S.F.” and “Raincloud I” are not merely pauses between proper songs. They alter how the surrounding music is perceived, creating little chambers of sound where the album can lose its outline. Sceptre Hole understands that pop becomes more vivid when it is allowed to brush against abstraction.
That is another improvement the future can make. Genres that once had to stand apart can now coexist inside one person’s imagination. Jangle pop, punk, drone, homemade electronics, psychedelic atmosphere and melodic tenderness no longer require separate uniforms or declarations of allegiance. They can occupy neighboring rooms and pass signals through the walls.
Rat Columns are not exceptional because they invented every ingredient. Very few artists ever do. They are exceptional because they understand what the ingredients can still become when placed in a slightly different emotional order.
The record also carries geography in a peculiar way. David West came from Perth, but Sceptre Hole was recorded in San Francisco with a small working band. The music belongs completely to neither place. It has crossed an ocean and entered another underground network, gathering musicians and equipment without losing the inward quality at its center. This is not global culture as a smooth commercial product. It is the older and stranger version: people finding one another because records, tours, friendships and shared tastes create hidden routes between distant cities.
Private Release understands those routes. A record pressed in only 500 copies can travel far beyond the original objects. It becomes an MP3, a rip, an upload, a folder, a recommendation or a post encountered fourteen years later by somebody who hears proof that musical life did not stop when his own youth ended.
That may be the more personal argument contained here.
It is easy to mistake our most formative period for culture’s highest point because that was when everything entered us most violently. The bands were new because we were new. A guitar sound could reorganize a life because the walls had not yet hardened around what music was allowed to mean. Years later, unfamiliar artists sometimes seem to arrive after the important decisions have already been made.
Sceptre Hole refuses that story.
It does not ask the listener to abandon older records or pretend that influence is unimportant. It demonstrates that the conversation continued. The younger musicians heard some of the same things, loved them from another position in time, and carried them somewhere we could not have predicted from the original moment.
The future becomes better not because every new record surpasses every old one. That would be a silly competition, and music does not need a podium. It becomes better because the world keeps gaining more possible combinations. Nothing truly loved has to vanish when another generation arrives. It can be remembered, misunderstood, altered, restored, digitized, played too loudly, slowed down, mixed with something once considered incompatible and handed to another person.
The archive expands, but so does the imagination capable of using it.
Rat Columns make music from that expanded field. Their songs contain the pleasure of recognition without being imprisoned by it. A guitar may remind us of another decade, but the life moving through it belongs to the moment of recording. The past supplies tools. The present supplies necessity.
Following Ratboys, this album strengthens the lesson. First, a photograph nearly caused me to dismiss a band whose joy and ability overturned the judgment. Now Rat Columns show why that judgment would have been historically mistaken as well as personally limiting. Younger artists are not trespassing upon our memories when they use sounds we loved. They are keeping those sounds alive by finding out what else they can carry.
The old records do not become smaller because Sceptre Hole exists.
The world becomes larger.
There are moments here when the guitars seem to glow without producing much heat, when the drums push a sad song into motion, and when a voice half-hidden by the recording becomes more affecting because it cannot be completely reached. Nothing announces itself as the future of music. It simply plays, quietly confident that the future has room for this too.
That may be the strongest evidence of all.
Just listen and hear it.
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