Listen to and purchase the 4 EPs here.
As any of their fans really should know, The Oh Hellos are one of the most literate bands out there. From the beginning of their discography, the band’s lyrics have shown a deep appreciation and understanding for C.S. Lewis’ work. Maggie and Tyler Heath, the lead singers and writers/producers of the band’s music, also seem to share one of Lewis’ greatest passions: myth. We hardly have to look past the titles of their albums to see all this. Their second album Dear Wormwood is a clear reference to Lewis, and their latest series of EPs is an equally clear reference to Greek mythology. The Oh Hellos’ songs are riddled with modern and ancient literary reference, and it helps to come at their music having read a bit oneself.
In 2017, the band released the first of a series of four EPs, titled Notos, one of the four cardinal winds of ancient Greek culture. This EP was followed by Eurus in 2018; Boreas and Zephyrus were to come out back to back in 2020. Notos, Eurus, Boreas, and Zephyrus are the primary winds from the south, east, north, and west, respectively; associated with hot summer, stormy autumn, bitter winter, and life-giving spring, respectively. The four cardinal winds collectively are called the Anemoi, and thus, I refer to this 4-EP series as the Anemoi Cycle.
We really ought to assume right out that 4 EPs released in sequence with an associated naming convention will be closely related in theme, carrying threads of meaning from EP to EP, developing ideas into one mature whole. When the lyrics of the Anemoi Cycle are read closely, we see just that. One has to have the time and a bit of literacy of her own to see it, but threads are definitely woven through. And though in the following review I will not be able to give credit to every reference, allusion, and image I have seen in the Anemoi Cycle, I would be willing to bet that a number went over my head anyway. The Oh Hellos have given me about as much as I can handle, and I hope reviewing 4 EPs at once will not end up being too ambitious.
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The cycle’s primary motif, which is ultimately just one concept overarching many sub-themes, is the metaphorical linking of natural winds (and natural forces generally) to the breathy winds of human speech (and some less natural consequences of our words). The cycle begins in its first song with a reference to 1 Kings 19, where Elijah encounters YHWH at Mount Sinai. Elijah expects to hear the voice of God thundering in a mighty wind, a terrible earthquake, or a raging fire; however, it was in the sound of a low whisper that he finally encounters the goodness of God’s declarations.
The quiet voice of God foiled against the discordant crashing of nature is enough for the song’s speaker to claim, “I know you want me to be afraid. I know you want me to love you.” There is a tension in these words, an ambivalence toward what appears to be an unreasonable, unapproachable, or capricious god. Like Job, the speaker of the Anemoi Cycle struggles to see God’s goodness throughout creation and human endeavors, but that does not stop him from holding fast to a faith that God is ultimately good. (Tyler and Maggie split lead singing responsibilities fairly equally throughout their discography. Simply for ease and clarity’s sake, the balance of this review will refer to the songs’ speaker with masculine pronouns.)
With God on the backburner, where quiet voices tend to find themselves, other voices and louder winds rush onto the scene, some from material sources and some from the sinful state of man. These gusts and gales lead to the unnatural establishment of man’s impulse toward dominion and the suffering that attends both moral and natural evils. Whatever goodness YHWH might have been whispering on the mountain, these intruding voices “shout down the quiet kingdom come.” Early in the drama crisis enters the story.
—
Another major theme that is tucked away in this surprisingly dense first track is that of wanton words establishing empiric aspirations for man-made structure. In the Anemoi Cycle, slow natural growth ushered in by the meandering seasons is good. Irregular and unnatural manufactured growth is bad. So, when we hear that the wild wind is “firing bricks from broken canon and prose to build a wall so high it reaches the heavens in the sky,” this is very bad news.
We do well to stop here and look closely at these particular lyrics before moving on; it will help us better understand the songs to come. Ample evidence throughout their discography reveals that The Oh Hellos is a band with strong Christian roots. Their lyrics show great respect for and interest in C.S. Lewis, one of the greatest modern Christian minds, and they engage with issues of faith besides; however, The Oh Hellos has never been marketed as a Christian band, and their songs are far from evangelical in any way.
Without knowing the Heath siblings personally, I cannot say what their religious commitments are, though it is hardly a stretch to assert that they are believers. Based on my understanding of their songs, it seems to me that they would probably subscribe to some form of mere Christianity and are uncomfortable with common expressions of the Christian religion, especially nationalistic expressions in America. This is how they could claim “broken canon and prose” is creating an earthen barrier limiting man’s access to God. The eternal Word made flesh through whom all things were made (John 1) is not necessarily the canonized word we have today (or our limited interpretation of those scriptures). This reading gives more and more importance to the windy, aethereal Spirit against any leaden texts.
When man relies on his own blustery words or those dead on the page, what we get is empire and strife. The speaker says, “I can feel it on my tongue. Brick and mortar as thick as scripture, drawing lines in the sand and laying borders as tall as towers.” This image goes on to depict the Tower of Babel as a symbol of a God-forsaken Babylonian domination leading inevitably to the crashing cymbals of words without love and the gnashing molars of existence without God. This is life without the Spirit breathing in and through us.
The best we mortals have on our own is good intentions, and that is saying very little. We might do our best, but our best is terrible. We might aim close enough, but between our present and God’s eternity lies a universe so wide that close enough sends us on a straight-line trajectory far from our target. “Cause like constellations a million years away, every good intention is interpolation, a line we drew in the array. Looking for the faces, looking for the shapes in the silence.” From our vantage point, we see our Grecian heroes, those paltry earth-bound gods, outlined in the stars, but we are playing at scales beyond our capacity to comprehend. We need the living breath of the Spirit to overwhelm our mortal interpretations, interpolations, and intentions.
—
The second track on Notos, ‘Torches,’ begins with, “I got a venom like a snake running out of my mouth.” The Bible makes it abundantly clear in many verses that the tongue has power to build up, but mostly has the power to harm. The Proverbs advise us to talk as little as necessary. But these poisonous winds will not easily be calmed. We hurt each other with our words. And so we begin a cycle of harm and remorse, of sin and confession:
Over and over, again,
we keep that old wheel turning.
Over and over, again,
we lay the next spoke down.
Over and over, again,
oceans will roll in.
Over and over, again,
we spin it around.
It may not look like it, but in the quote above we are introduced to two more major sub-themes of the Anemoi Cycle: the frustrating yet perhaps healthy and natural repetition of series, revolutions, rhythms, and cycles; and the close association between wind and water. These will follow us through each of the Anemoi.
Notos’ title track suggests that some stormy winds we humans face are wrapped up in the forces of nature, personified by the Greek gods; however, those of us formed in the likeness of the creator God still bear some means of creation and destruction, life and death. We produce winds of our own, and the results are not always as positive as we might hope:
Every inhale I take swallows the ocean whole, and I am one
with the hurricane, tall as the tide that laps with a rabid tongue.
With every exhale, I break you down with a fury, I lay the hills undone,
like a dog gone untamed, bellowing out a river from my lungs.
The tongue is truly a powerful force. Mortals can participate in natural evils by sucking up the destruction we see around us and shouting reactionary spite and hatred. “Every word you shouldn’t say will come bubbling out of your throat,” and you will be that much less distinguishable from the capricious gods of nature.
As we move to the last song on Notos, which acts as a bridge to the next wind, season, and EP, Eurus, we are not left without reason to hope. ‘New River’ introduces us to the fact that the wind and water of nature, and so too our moral responsibilities, are not left to the temperamental Olympian gods of earth. We have a rejuvenating and life-giving resource with the ability to make us new. It may take “forever and a day for the canyons and coasts to erode away,” but undaunted and providential universal laws far transcend the power of individual storms and short-lived human attrition. What was built up will eventually be worn down, “and though the eons may pass as slow as the sands of an hourglass, every grain that we’ve counted claims that even the mountains can change.”
Mountains will move, canyons will be re-cut, and the river will change its course as it abides these tempests. We too are invited to be remade by the gentle rains. “The clouds overhead open up for the wicked and the just all the same.” All we have to do is let God’s goodness take its effect.
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The levelling effect of these overwhelming trans-millennial forces is illuminated on the second EP, Eurus. Our words may have cut some down, but so too we build up the artifice and façade of empire, building walls, towers, ziggurats, temples, and the like. There are many unhealthy ways for humans to be human. But after we have built up these constructed human institutions, the “weary nations weep,” “the tables in the temple will be tuned on their side,” and “the pillars of the empire will be burned in kind.” We may have built a mountain of ourselves, piling on layer after layer of unfounded pride, but we are still invited by God “to cut away the mountains… and fill the dales below.” With or without us, God will ensure that “every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low” (Is. 40:4).
‘Grow,’ the second song on Eurus, shows us the hope that has been patiently sleeping in the seeds of our human potential while we were busy walling up our world in stone. Creeping, green life will not be forestalled forever. Those things diametrically opposed to reckless human dominion are too hearty to be killed by a few centuries of cultural and architectural progress. When we stop our doomed striving and just let be what will be, our structures come loose, our towers fall, and “every stone is thrown like seeds across the ground, a new Arcadia [unspoiled and blissful wilderness] will come around and multiply until the binds of death have been unwound.” The ruins will fall and nature will return to its Edenic state; then we might see that “the ground all around, it was always holy.”
Eurus’ title track gives us a bit of the reasoning why we ought to discard our egoistic priorities. ‘Eurus’ tells us a tale of the gods. The ancient Greek gods were very ungodly compared to our modern, monotheistic understanding of divinity. In fact, the Olympians were very often used to emphasize the tragic consequences of human vices. The stories of the gods, however, came out quite farcical because immortal gods rarely encounter serious consequences. Instead, their human counterparts were often those who suffered from the fickle whims of these careless immortals.
As the Greek gods were used to personify human vices, so too were they used to explain many cyclical and catastrophic natural phenomena. Thus, we often see the gods doing nothing more than keeping humanity in a constant state of confused anxiety, always demanding more than they would give in return.
‘Eurus’ comes hard and fast with classical references, non-sensical to those without some background in Greek or Roman myth. The speaker compares himself to Sisyphus, eternally bound to fruitless toil. Zeus and faithless Venus (i.e. the forces of nature and man’s evil will) “take the first nine out of every ten,” making the Christian tithe look very appealing. Madam Fortuna (the luck of the draw when it comes to our destiny) sits back and watches the drama unfurl. The speaker is left to fight tooth and nail, demanding tooth for tooth and eye for eye, crushing his human kin for what little gain he might acquire. But this gain will never be taken beyond the grave, and again, like Sisyphus, his toil was in vain, doomed within a cycle of avarice that laughs at his sincere desire for goodness.
In the face of what seems to be the utter futility of life, what can man do? The next song, ‘Hieroglyphs,’ shows one approach, one that the speaker clearly denounces. There are those of a particular religious stripe quite common in conservative Christian circles who look past the earthly life we’re living now and focus instead on the coming rapture, the Millennium, and everything else tied to the Apocalypse. These people are too busy thinking ahead, drawing arrays to see those heavenly images they are looking for, to notice that they and their sisters and brothers are living in the here and now.
The world spins round, and though we may have reason to hope for the end of our earthly labors, we still have to live in this passing world, year after year. Looking to the end is helping no one and harming quite a few.
These religious bankrupts only value what they might find in the heavens, not realizing that:
Even the great celestial hieroglyphs
are bodies of dust illuminated, and if
the heavens can be both sacred and dust,
oh, maybe so can the rest of us.
Stop here, and dwell on this idea. It is at the core of the Anemoi Cycle. The speaker is calling us away from human achievement if it can only be found built on the foundation of empire. He is also calling us away from keeping our heads in the clouds, where we cannot see the mundane holiness of life on earth. We are being asked to take notice of sacred things that are to be seen on the ground, connected to nature, dependent on man, good and blessed as they are.
The last track on this autumn album that leads into wintry Boreas is ‘Passerine,’ and it ought to be the most convicting of all the songs in the Anemoi Cycle. The church bells of the Roman Empire, that Holy Roman Empire, call out to all the cultural Christians across the world. But the speaker is not sure if he ought to answer the call any longer. He no longer feels like he’s birds of a feather with anyone who is content to subscribe to the popular western concept of Christianity. These ‘believers’ he sees around him are looking more like empiric centurions than little Christs, and that is very concerning. Somewhere along the way something must have gone wrong.
But our speaker is not condemning all those around him without bearing some of the blame he knows he deserves himself.
I can’t shake this feeling that I was only
pushing the spear into your side again…
My palms and fingers still reek of gasoline
from throwing fuel to the fire of that Greco-Roman dream,
purifying the holy rock to melt the gilded seams.
Yes, he contributed to the evil of heartless religion that pervades his culture. He can hardly sing those old hymns that always gave him such comfort, for to do so is to confront the holiness and purity of Jesus Christ’s sacrifice, to again and again realize his part in putting Jesus on the cross and in the grave. And what for? Whatever little precious metal he could squeeze from the holy rock like the utilitarian pragmatist that he is.
Ashamed, having deserted the only goodness he knew, what will he do? Face the lonely winter alone. Boreas is coming, blowing from the north.
When he comes a knocking at my door,
what am I to do, what am I to do, oh Lord?
When the cold wind rolls in form the north,
what am I to do, what am I to do, oh Lord?
—
Fittingly, Boreas’ lyrics are ushered in with the second track, ‘Cold.’ As autumn wains and that northern wind begins to blow, whatever warmth was left leeches out of our threadbare coverings, leaving so slowly that we hardly notice when it is entirely gone. No warmth, no life. Our very tidy religiosity has left us with linens as white as virgin snow, a blanket that kills the breathy songs of the previous two EPs.
The sound don’t carry,
won’t rise or fall.
It damps the racket, chokes it back:
a strangle hold.
Our good intentions, those arrows misaimed at the heavenly images we held so dear, now pave the road right down into Hades, where the wealth we acquired is utterly wasted. But so long as there is breath in his lungs, our speaker is not prepared to accept this fate.
I’m not quite ready to turn to bone,
to petrify the shred of life I’m holding onto.
There’s no peace to upset; that spirit’s flown.
This ossified philosophizing’s getting old.
Whatever theology his culture has been holding onto, it is turning bone to stone, life to fossil. Whatever religiosity got us here can take us no further, not beyond the grave. We need a breath of life.
On the next track we hear the speaker claim that he is really only speaking for himself, not wishing to mete judgment on anyone else. Any street-corner preaching he would do would probably be taken the wrong way anyway, so he submits instead to the arduous process of natural growth and change. If he is going to evangelize, his sermon will no longer be the blustery maelstrom from Notos, but will instead be a steady dripping, like water off an icicle.
He is seeking humility, perhaps seeing something entirely new:
You don’t know what you don’t know yet.
Yeah, I go on forgetting it.
Don’t you go on forgetting it, too…
What did I miss, what did I miss, what did I miss?
It seems at this point as though our speaker has thoroughly abandoned any sense of traditional structured religion, but such a conclusion would be ill-founded. It is one particular type of religion that he has left behind. But he believes the church might yet survive, as we suppose the bride of Christ must. ‘Rose’ is a cleverly disguised expression of hope in Christ’s Church.
The Church catholic has failed mightily in her history. Holy wars and crusades, genocides and countless catastrophes have been committed in her name. But if we called a spade a spade, called the pot black first, took the plank from our own eye, and divorced this bride from her illicit loves (namely human striving toward empiric ambitions), we might renew her good name. She might smell as sweet as she once did.
No more hypocrisy. No more excuses. No more false promises repaid in fool’s gold. We cannot fake our way into salvation, and none of this is worthy of what should be a spotless bride. We Christians might think God’s Church smells of nothing but roses, but the world has been calling her a thorny briar instead, and if we give them reason to long enough, the truth of her beauty will become indistinguishable from the ugliness of a wicked fairytale.
What is necessary? True, honest love. But this divine Love is also demanding, and we have some stuff to let go of if salvation is going to take:
Love’ll get you slaughtered
like a ram at the altar.
What is safe ain’t the same as what is good.
So lay compress to the aching
of your body made for breaking.
We’ve got a lot of breaking left to do.
We have come down to the very bottom. Back on the floor, eyes to the ceiling, the speaker is unraveling. Seemingly, his final hope is to start some holy conflagration, a cleansing forest fire to burn down all that must die to give life and warmth to whatever is left worth keeping. Part of him still hopes that his work will pay off, that it was not all in vain; the other part just wants to let it go up in flames.
But in a continuation of the theme of natural cycles, rebirth and growth, he mumbles a desperate prayer, giving words to his final hope.
Promise me that you’ll start where I end,
and I promise to give you everything I am.
(On and on and on)
We’ll go on and on and on in the end.
The final song of Boreas once again leads into the next EP, the final in the cycle. ‘Glowing’ rumbles with new life pushing up through the frozen earth. Our speaker looks at his death, and it does not look as definitive as the apocalyptic Left Behind series would have us believe. Instead, things just go on, without the end we thought we saw coming. We look as foolish as a flat-earther never finding the ice-wall he was seeking.
Further, the winds that enlivened the previous EPs have disappeared with the scribes who tried to put their commandments and promises to the page. We humans distorted the goodness of the winds and words with our selfish, individualistic ethics, and we lost anything worth trying to record. The world has bigger problems now, no time for reading anyway, and it is our fault for abandoning our calling:
The inkwells of prophecy and cartography dried up long ago.
They’re hoarse from speaking of our studied hesitation
to shoulder the weight of our bad-bеhaving.
‘Cause when Atlas shrugs, whose back is breaking?
Our human institutions and manmade ethical systems are broken, and as these behemoth structures crumble, it is those at the bottom who are crushed. Didn’t the Bible tell us something about caring for these downtrodden unfortunates?
—
Well, these concerns open the fourth and final EP of the Anemoi Cycle, Zephyrus, the life-giving western spring wind. The first sign of life we see after the bitter winter begins to thaw is a Latina mother weaving a basket to push her baby down the Rio Grande like a modern-day Moses. She hopes that an empire with the resources of America might give her baby a better chance at life, in spite of the peril that she is releasing him into. She is relying on the arbitrary goodwill of a pharaoh who could hardly care less.
How can she do this? How could she put her baby in so much danger? Some might say it is desperation. Others would do well to call it faith: an idea, a faith as small as a seed, “like mustard greens, like newborn fingers curled and half asleep.” This organic, living faith breaks through the hard soil that has crusted over the speaker’s heart. This faith rejuvenates him. It is a new wine, not to be put in old wineskins. Call it what you will, but we are going to see all things made new!
The paltry metallic idols and manufactured religion that we had once subscribed to is shipped off to the dump in parts. As that crumbling Olympus is hauled away, we see evidence of mountains moving. Back on Notos and Eurus we built ourselves up within an empiric framework, making much of ourselves, forming unnecessarily burdensome mountains. Now with faith as small as a mustard seed, we might see our mountain moved.
In ‘Theseus,’ the faith that sprouted in the previous song still evades the speaker. Faith is tricky like that. It is always,
at the edges of my fingers,
never quite closing round it.
Oh, that peace like a river
always going, but never getting.
Seems like maybe it’s not all that much a place
as it is a way.
But whether it’s a way we pursue, a running river, or a trickling thaw from the winter’s ice, faith is doing the work of the new river from Notos. It cuts through the earth and creates a new canyon, slowly but surely. Water falls from the sky, flows in grooves through the earth, returns to the sea, only to begin its cycle again.
Definitively unlike a traditional view of apocalypse and seemingly contrary to the testimony of Revelation, the speaker claims that we should just expect this cycle to continue. Though scripture tells us that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night, that the sky will roll back and trumpets will resound, ushering in calamities, the speaker claims that “whatever kingdom come, it probably won’t come quick, no mighty clarion to announce it.” Instead of a single-use ark to avoid an otherwise total destruction of humanity, the speaker tells us we have a ship like Theseus’, which in classic histories is said to have been safely harbored at Athens where damaged parts of the ship were replaced, keeping the boat strong and new for several centuries.
The speaker is asking us to avoid making the mistake of withdrawn millennialists who do not bother with seeking justice here and now because they only believe in the Kingdom of God in a heavenly existence. Reasonably, we are asked to keep fixing what we know will break again because we only have the one earth to live on and steward well. It is right and good to care for the earth and care for each other, trying to contribute to the kingdom of heaven in the present, for truly it is at hand. Problematically, it is suggested (if only implicitly), that we should not expect the new Jerusalem, the new earth to come down from heaven as dramatically as scripture seems to suggest.
Either way, regardless of the speaker’s theological view of the end times (or lack thereof), his point is well received. We must live now as we must live now. We do not have another life to live. We cannot sit on the sidelines waiting for the apocalypse to happen. We have to stop acting like this earth and its residents are disposable. So long as we are stewards of this earth and kin to each other, let’s live a little more responsibly, as God commanded.
Zephyrus’ title track reprises the idea that the heavens, the constellations that might once have inspired our ideas of divinity, are actually just some cosmic dust, ultimately the same basic stuff we are made out of. But instead of suggesting that the astral order is just some more humdrum earth in the sky like a modern secularist might, the song conversely claims that there is something divine in us. We suppose that the Creator knew what he was doing: “we are matter, and it matters.” Organic life is a wonderful thing. Animal life is more surprising still. Human consciousness is properly miraculous. The fact that we breathe life with the life to which we are called to tend: that is something divine.
We are called again to contribute to the goodness of life, as simple as it seems to be sometimes. The mighty winds and waters of our speech, only possible through consciousness, are not some polar opposite of earthly life. God forbid. Oil and water, organic and everything on which it depends, these will mix. We just have to soften our hold and let nature do its thing.
—
At this point, you’re probably saying, “Paul, you’re getting a little repetitive in this review. We’ve basically heard all this already.”
Gladly, I do not have to answer your charge. The final song in the Anemoi Cycle does it for me.
‘Rounds’ wraps up everything that has been said thus far by reorienting us on two of the cycle’s primary themes: wind as breath as words and the ubiquity of cycle, repetition, rebirth. Having brought you this far, I think you have more than enough context to interpret the lyrics of the last song of the last EP for yourself. I’ll let the band play us out on a quietly hopeful note:
Am I still speaking?
Yeah, I’m long in the wind.
I’ll go on and on and on again
if my chest don’t cave in.
When did I last breathe in?
Am I empty again?
Oh, that wind that I’ve been spending
is a long one my friend.
Be the sun [son?] as my witness,
better prophets could pen
a thousand words for every chord
I could ever begin.
May their carbon given
be an echoing hymn
that goes on and on and on again
so long as I live.
Round, around, around again,
will you start where I end?
Am I still speaking?
Yeah, I’m long in the wind.
I’ll go on and on and on again
if my chest don’t cave in.