It’s one of my life’s great treasures to stumble upon a new artist you connect with, made even better when they’re from our great city of Chicago! I only recently got turned onto Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist Steve Slagg, and what good timing with the upcoming release of their second studio album I Don't Want to Get Adjusted to This World out on September 21. Not only is this album the second release under their own name but Slagg has been quietly releasing albums under the moniker Youngest Son since 2011 and playing in the extremely underrated local power pop band Mooner for the better part of the last decade (please go check out their 2015 album Masterpiece!)
It’s safe to say Steve Slagg plays an instrumental part in the grand colorful soundscape that is our blossoming local music community and on their latest album, I Don't Want to Get Adjusted to This World, Steve Slagg offers up 11 new cuts of pure folk rock bliss. He dabbled with folk rock on prior albums but the influence of Fleet Foxes, M. Ward, Father John Misty, Dan Fogelberg, The Antlers, and even Silver Jews has never been so apparent as on this new album. Even with all those influences, Slagg still manages to sound unique and one-of-a-kind on I Don't Want to Get Adjusted to This World due to their distinctive timbre, eccentric instrumentals, and introspective lyrics surrounding grief, love, loss, despair, and how gay plants and animals really are.
The album starts on a glorious high note with my favorite song on the record, “The Newest Soil.” For those of you who have been stuck in the cycle of abuse that is Adrianne Lenker’s new album Bright Future, “The Newest Soil” is similar in style and personality to its opening track called “Real House”. Both songs feature incredibly introspective lyrics describing real-life experiences with grief held up with quaint, sparse instrumentals that all go together well enough for five plus minutes to make even the most hardened cowboy cry for reasons unknown only to them. It’s patient, meditative, important, evocative, beautiful, breathtaking, and a brave way to start an album and it couldn’t have paid off more for Slagg. “Fruita” proves to be a perfect follow-up to “The Newest Soil” as it contrasts with a grander instrumental palette of a full-band backdrop but doesn’t juxtapose too much in terms of overall tempo and sincerity all the while doing its darndest to give you a better picture of what this album is going to sound like; it’s warm, comforting, glistening with dreams of autumn, and surrounded by gorgeous folk melodies to boot, AKA what you can safely expect from the rest of this album!
Next up we have “Heaven (Yet)”, which kicks up the pace a bit providing a bit more of a rock feel distinctive from the first two songs being more reserved and rather quiet musically. This track has a really fun chorus backed by a jaunty rhythm section of jangly guitars, blossoming drums, and what may very well be some lovely flute (if I could more confidently pick out flute parts in pop songs, I would, but I can’t) added in for a little extra spice. The overall color that this track adds to the album as a whole is beautiful, to say the least, and is definitely one of my favorites within this collection of songs.
Keeping the fun times rolling, “Indigo Bunting” provides us with inspiring melodies that immediately take you to the great outdoors and into the deepest western plains filled with trees, a glistening sun, birds chirping overhead, and maybe even your best dog (gender-neutral) boy by your side. The instrumentals are simple, short, and sweet with a chorus that you can’t help but smile with how catchy those vocal melodies are. The added cherry on top is all the guitar and perhaps flute riffs in the song that mimic a bird’s call in the cutest of ways. If there’s one thing this song proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, it’s Steve Slagg’s attention and obsession to the finest details that make any normal, run-of-the-green-mill song into a masterpiece.
“Little Missouri” slows it down a bit, leaning more so into the dark and mystical side with some evocative guitar chords, scant percussion, and a sprinkle of haunting organ work for good measure. The song feels very road-worn and tired in a great way and provides a nice change of scenery from the previous four songs with its overall musical personality leaning a bit more into the introverted. The song also pairs incredibly well with the following track, “Ken Burns Effect”, a lovely, spacious instrumental piece multi-layered with the most serene and peaceful musical synth textures made possible by AAESPO, and even some quaint horn sounds for that grounded earthly touch.
Heading into the back half of the album now with the title track, “I Don’t Want to Get Adjusted to This World” is another massive favorite of mine and does all it can to give off that grand title track charisma. Built upon the foundation of a fantastic folky chord progression and simple, soft percussion, the song is perhaps the most indie folk track on the album with healthy doses of keys and slide guitar. The song also features what might be Steve Slagg’s most impressive vocals ranging from the eccentric vocal lines of the chorus to the towering highs of the bridge. This has easily been my most played track on the album and a song I’m definitely going to be coming back to for a long time; quintessential modern folk rock right here, folks.
“Outside All the Time” comes in shimmering with some subtle acoustic fingerpicking with a melody that hearkens back to the golden age of singer/songwriter music. The song meanders along with just guitar and vocals until the last minute where it blossoms beautifully into this lush backdrop of all these different instruments working together to weave this majestic piece of folk art that coalesces into one of my favorite moments on the album. We are eight songs into an eleven-song album and Slagg is still managing to both impress and surprise!
As I'm writing this review, the album isn’t even out yet but “Free OBO” already feels like what will become the most underrated cut off the album. It starts off rather unpresuming as most piano-centric ballads do but throughout its three-and-a-half-minute runtime, it builds up the intensity slowly but surely until it climaxes a little bit after the halfway point as the drums and guitars kick in resulting in what sounds like your favorite Dawes track. The fun doesn’t stop there as the song caps off with this jazzy percussive explosion of crazed cymbal and tom hits and these wonderfully cute synths that sound like the musical equivalent of a bubble bursting. This song feels most in line with the songs I’ve heard from Steve Slagg’s past musical projects compared to the rest of the new album’s overwhelming folk voice. All to say, while this song doesn’t feel out of place on this record, it is a welcome change of pace and scenery from what the other tracks present to us; diversity in sound is important!
Up until this point in the album, I’ve, more or less, loved every second of it. However, the album’s penultimate song “Alleluia (Again)” is where things start to head a bit south for me. Granted, this is the second to last song on the album so we’ve had a pretty damn good run and it’s not to say the song is a complete write-off because it very much isn’t, it’s just the first song on the album that I could do without. The track starts strong enough with some amusing lyrics that are as gay as they are wholesome and even a lyrical nod to what maybe is the greatest song in the world, “A Wild Kindness” by Silver Jews from their seminal 1998 album American Water. A backdrop of a full band eventually swells in and this very modest-sounding song turns into a full-blown Steely Dan song with this '70s rock edge that would prick you (in a good way) if you got too close.
About a third of the way through the song, however, is when this quieter, quasi-bridge section is introduced and the song just starts to meander for me without doing much. I wasn’t really sure where the song was headed and the meandering had me wanting to skip to the next track especially when a minute and a half into this musical interim it started becoming more pronounced and grander with the repetitive chanting of the word “Alleluia”. That repetition lingers for close to two minutes as it closes out the nearly six-minute-long song and the stylistic choices just weren’t for me, unfortunately, but I hope they are for others!
I can thankfully say that the album does, indeed, end on a high note. “The Last Scarecrow” may not be one of my favorites on the album but it’s a brilliant finale to a majestic album. The first three minutes of the song are just flat-out gorgeous and sublimely satisfying to a fault. How the song starts off with the softest and most supple of piano melodies backing an awe-inspiring display of vocal talent is quite amazing, to say the least. Then you get the slide guitar embellishments and the florescent cymbal work that tells you this song is about to kick it into the sun. Soon enough we get this magnificent yet subtle beat drop as the drums come fully in for the next verse and it’s so simple yet so beautiful; it makes me want to cry. I don’t love how the song spends its last minute melodically speaking. I almost feel like I got set up to hear certain things that never came about or maybe the melody so slightly altered in its final moments to something I wasn’t expecting and thus have a hard time accepting, but that’s all to say the song fades out for me in not the most memorable of ways. I do love, however, the last-minute inclusion of some horns to elevate what was already at an all-time elevation high. Slagg truly knows how to work and build a song and the proof is right here in the scarecrow pudding.
I truly can’t say enough wonderful things about this album. Although I have listened to some of Steve Slagg’s past efforts as a solo artist and in their other bands Mooner and Youngest Son, I can confidently say I Don’t Want to Get Adjusted to This World outshines them all. I don’t think he ever fully leaned into this new folk sound as much as he did on this record but it suits him like John Prine and Sunday mornings; I can only hope he sticks in this direction with any of their future output. Songs like “The Newest Soil” and the title track are among the most daring, impressive, and outright enjoyable songs I’ve heard all year by any artist and it actually physically pains me this album won’t reach the audience it deserves, at least not at first, but hopefully in time. If you’d like to be on the right side of history, please go check out fellow Silver Jews lover Steve Slagg’s second solo record I Don’t Want to Get Adjusted to This World and reap all the fruitas of their labor.
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