Quick Spins takes a quick look at recently released albums to make certain you're listening to all the quality music being released these days. And with today being Bandcamp Friday, I'm hoping some of the words below will spur you to actually listen to, and then buy, these excellent new releases today while all the dough goes directly to the artists!
the Mountain Goats
Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan
For a band that began as a man, his guitar, a tape recorder, and more lyrics than one would think you could fit into a rhythmic line at a time, the Mountain Goats have evolved into one of the more fearlessly adventurous groups today. In the last decade or so the band has challenged themselves on every album, tying each to a concept, and following musical paths that have grown less predictable with every release.
Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan, out today, was literally built out of a hastily scribbled phrase encountered in a dream John Darnielle had. And that single phrase spurred the Mountain Goats down yet another concept-album path. In the past it has seemed the group thrived on providing artistic challenges to themselves to help keep things interesting, but this time around they opened the floodgates and decided to race to the shore with a full-blown musical. As in overtures, recurring themes, sing-along moments, and a reasonably solid storyline about a shipwrecked crew. How much of a musical is it? Darneille has long run song ideas past Lin-Manuel Miranda, but this is the first time Miranda has actually appeared on an album from the Mountain Goats.
This is all interesting and incredibly cool, but it's not the best thing about Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan. In recent years the Mountain Goats have undertaken a number of tours using different iterations of the core line-up of Darnielle, multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas, and drummer Jon Wurster. On each these tours, Douglas has been given freer rein to display his own considerable skills, and the band placed production duties in his hands for this new album. The result is a record stuffed with sonic delights, produced by carefully considering every musical element, and delivers a new evolution in the band's sound that is honestly surprising in its ambitions. This kind of evolution in a band usually results in music that can sound stilted in its perfection, but Douglas manages to add crystalline clarity to the proceeding while never once allowing things to get soulless or airless.
The joy of this album is the journey it takes, and I fear writing any more about it might steal some of the initial delight from you, dear reader. But get onboard; you won't regret it!
Sadlands
Try To Have A Little Fun
I love power-pop but even I can admit that its formulas can often deliver songs that immediately deliver pleasure while quickly dissipating. Brooklyn-based Sadlands take those power-pop structures, scuff them up and keep the hooks while dispensing with the predictability to keep these nuggets lodged in your ears. They then inject what's left with urgently delivered and plaintively emotional vocals to create fist-punching sing-alongs that ensure your heart, not caring much about your head.
Anyone who knows me also knows that I consider the Josie & the Pussycats soundtrack to be one of the greatest power-pop albums of the aughts, and dang if Sadlands doesn't give me similar feels on their full-length debut, Try To Have A Little Fun. And Sadlands doesn't have the benefit of a rotating cast of the best songwriters in the world on their album! They suffice with a small, contained cast of some of the best songwriters I've heard in a long time.
I've had this on repeat over the last month or so—a considerable commitment when you realize I eschew listening to even my favorite albums from the past in an effort to always keep apace with new releases—and the initial pleasure I felt upon my first listen has held intact.
Try To Have A Little Fun by Sadlands
Gina Barcal
Midwest ’til the End
Gina Barcal has been a staple of the Chicago rock scene since the '90s, usually found fronting or co-fronting loud and raucous groups including The Pillowmints, The Venom Lords, and even the all-woman KISS tribute band Slutter. She's put in more than her fair share of time playing grungy clubs, drinking at slashies until sunrise, and eating diner food with her friends at 3 a.m. And Barcal was a woman covered in tattoos long before it was the fashion. In other words, Gina totally rocks.
Which makes her debut solo EP Midwest ’til the End a complete shock. While I've heard Barcal perform solo acoustic shows over the years, the songs were always more grounded in her punkier (in the original sense, not the marketing one) sensibilities. But she did come from a family steeped in and surrounded by old school country music. In fact, now that I think of it, she could have capitalized on this decades ago and jumped on the alt-country bandwagon for an easy win. But it clearly wasn't in her soul enough back then, and I'm glad she didn't force it.
The past couple of years saw Barcal moving from Chicago to the Indiana Dunes with her husband, and it appears this new setting allowed her to truly probe what she wanted to do next musically. And the answer was to make the turn to hard-core, old school country music. Y'know, the kind of country replete with softly undulating pedal steel guitars and paeans to love and whiskey, with a heavy, heavy accent on love. And after working on the songs while looking out at the beach or. walking through the woods (or driving her sick vintage automobile through winding rural roads) Barcal took off to Nashville to record them with a full band.
I've spent much of my adult life like pushing back on people who decry my disinterest in most modern country music, and I am happy as can be that I can now point to a modern release that expertly delivers the kind of country music that does turn my heart into mush. And I truly hope the all too brief Midwest ’til the End EP is only a taste of what Barcal has in store for all of us.
Gina Barcal plays an album release show for Midwest ’til the End at Fitzgerald's on November 8, and while I'd recommend it on her songs alone, after seeing the number of local luminaries who will be her backing band that night, I strongly urge you not to miss it.
Midwest 'til the End by Gina Barcal
Meghan Mahowald currently performs under the name MEGG and is a total theater kid who explored various musical projects and directions before eventually finding her perfect match in aggressively poppy loud rawk. Her debut EP Low Life Club is full to the brim with the kind of big riffs that would've rocked the original WARPED Tour crowds, mixing of-the-moment pop-cultural references with the maturity someone in their mid-30s, creating a sound that deserves plastering teenage walls with posters off her, amping up morning commutes for moms and corporate types alike, and (hopefully) an explosive rise to finally break free of the L.A. scene for much-deserved wider recognition.
Low Life Club is not the sound of someone glomming onto a hip sound, this is the sound of a musician finally embracing the sound that was within them all along. And I am really happy that sound finally won its fight to get out and about in the world. My only regret? This would've been an awesome summer album, but given the long winter ahead I'll keep its dark rays of sunshine near the top of my personal playlist.
Low Life Club by MEGG
Pink Fuzz is led by sibling duo Lulu and John Demitro slashing the strings, backed by the walloping drums of Forrest Raup. And like any good music writer I try to avoid the "you'll like them because they sound like" construct, but in this case it is impossible to ignore that they sound like a scrappier version of Queens of the Stone Age, minus to pomp and amping up the pop. That doesn't make Resolution a rip-off by any means! But it is an extension of a sound many have grown to love, made personal by this tightly-knit trio.
I do love me some metal, and Pink Fuzz does too, but I've always been impressed more by the bands that cram a heavy rock attack into short and succinct structures, and this is what Pink Fuzz absolutely excels in. Your head will spin at their virtuosity, but you'll be building up a sweat as your body gives in to the music's grooves.
Resolution by Pink Fuzz
Evan Dando is having a bit of a moment right now, and the first album of new music from his band The Lemonheads in decades comes on the tail of his new (and quite excellent) memoir Rumors Of My Demise. So you can view this album in one of two ways.
I saw The Lemonheads play The Metro in 2022 and the songs on Love Chant mirror the engaging looseness of the gig that night, paired with Dando's reliably solid tunesmithing. While not as pristinely produced as the music The Lemonheads produced in their '90s heyday, nor as tightly arranged as their last study effort with original songs in 2006, Love Chant maintains Dando's uncanny knack for pulling tunes out of the ether to create songs that feel like you've always known them. There's a shaggy quality to the songs here, and while Dando brought in a number of collaborators to help flesh things out, this is 100% Dando’s show.
You could also view Love Chant through the lens of Dando's memoir as a triumphant return from the wilderness, now comfortable claiming his legacy as the godfather of the emerging '90s-indie era that was eventually consumed and denuded by the Major Labels. But that seems like too easy a media take on an album that deserves to be considered in its own right. Sure, it's hard to separate the myth of Evan Dando from the reality of his talented musicianship, but I think you'll be better served by doing so.
The Lemonheads play Thalia Hall on December 17 and tickets are available.
Love Chant by The Lemonheads