Dave Hause – Drive It Like It’s Stolen. Out now, available here.

*stretches back*

*cracks knuckles*

*rolls neck*

Let’s see if I remember how to do this.

It’s been a while since I wrote an album review – let’s be frank, it’s been a while since I thought about writing an album review – but some things never change, and Dave Hause still writes songs that sound hopeful while they despair, or sound despairing while they’re hopeful, or sometimes both at once. Drive It Like It’s Stolen is a really lush record that’s hallmarked by Hause’s smooth voice and the noisy choruses that he prefers, but it’s also full of synthesizers and strings and horns and a truly big sound that he hasn’t always tended towards (it reminds me more of late-era Gaslight Anthem than anything).

And for this record, it works: “Cheap Seats” and “Pedal Down” sort of amble through a slower paced start to the eventually churning and rocking and rolling sound that I expect from Hause, though both of finish with a kicked-off chorus and final verse before “Damn Personal” launches into the drum-driven punk that’s familiar to longtime fans.

i’m hope you’re drunk / i hope you’re sky high / i hope you’re every little thing that i can’t be tonight / now you’re gone / i’m smiling at the scar / i hope you know i’m thinking of you and i love you / ’cause you took it just a little too far

I haven’t been a live show since well before COVID, but Dave always put on a great one, in large part because so many of his songs are meant to shout along with, and “Damn Personal” is the first of several on this record that hit that sweet spot; the chorus gave me goose bumps. “Low” is equally full of hooks, an upbeat sounding song about struggling with sobriety that hit me right in the center of the chest. Hause has been sober for a number of years, but there’s a surprising amount of songwriting on the album that addresses the struggles of recovery, and all of those lyrics are really sharp and perceptive – whether it’s “Low” and “Hazard Lights” (it’s been so long since I sobbed over a record at work that I have multiple coworkers who weren’t around when this was a regular thing!) that are entire songs about it, or just offhand lyrics like in “lashingout”.

it’d be water into wine to turn these lemons into lemonade / i wanna be god for a day

The gentle lope of “Tarnish” is another song that’s just absolutely drenched in the language and behaviors of sobriety, and it’s really down to “Tarnish” and “Hazard Lights” for my favorite track. He closes it out with “The Vulture”, which finds the perfect spot between his normally driven punk-flavored folk and the deeper sonic landscape of this record, where the drums propel it forward and the chiming keyboards hold it up.

I really love the sound of this album – the lushness that I mentioned above, the strings, the horns, the fullness and roundness of the entire sound – and there’s a dud or two (“chainsaweyes” is meh and the title track probably could have been more dynamic though it grew on me) but Dave is just such a constant for me. His songwriting is always honest, and always full of lyric pairings that just hit me right in the heart. I didn’t know I needed this record until I heard it; I probably wouldn’t have appreciated it quite as much in April as I did when I listened to it for the first time last week. “Hazard Lights” has been on repeat since then, and it’s exactly what I needed to hear.

4 stars.