Quintessential, classy southern creek rock and shoegaze sound by the band from Asheville, North Carolina, fronted by singer and lyricist Karly Hartzman, in this sixth and possibly best yet LP packed with rich, meaty grungy guitar tones, and sharp, highly detailed, emotionally potent, narrative lyrics. Alongside the great pop and rock hooks, Hartzman is a very distinctive, idiosyncratic wordsmith, capturing specific candid obsessions and vulnerabilities with vivid images and snapshots of stories that fire out emotions with surprise phrases and turns, and has a delivery at times not unlike Australia’s Courtney Barnett. She describes this album as the “spiritual successor to Rat Saw God,” their last album from 2023. “Picking the ticks off of you / If you need me I’ll call you / In wino shoes he drags his feet / And I crawl toward you unkillably” come the opening lyrics of album on Reality TV Argument Bleeds. The catchy lightness of Townies is offset by images of visceral images: “Went to a party in the county / Stokin bonfires with leaf blowers / He got you in the back of his car just your sneakers and your drawers.” The beautiful, more folk acoustic Elderberry Wine, yet double-edged, bittersweet lyrics: “Sweet song is a long con / I drove ya to the airport with the E-brake on … You'll cry at commercials at an unbolted leg scraping against the ground as the tilt-a-whirl goes around roll one up say / it's mostly CBD / said I wanna have your baby / ‘cause I freckle and you tan/ I find comfort that angels don't give a damn.” The album is full of this lightning-thought drollness, with wide variety of moods from the elated to the downbeat. “Cracked my tooth on a cough drop … Foreign coins machine wont take / Cash out what we could to pay the rent,” she sings on Pick Up That Knife. “Grocery store sushi / You’re choppin ketamine / With a motel room key / Like a razor on a water slide / Surgeon seeing your scalpel sewn inside,” we hear on the darkly powerful Bitter Everyday. A superb mix of downbeat and uplifting from a songwriter with a very sharp mind for detail amid the noisy chaos, tedium and heartbreak of everyday life. Out on Dead Oceans.
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