By It’s our Bandcamp Picks of the Week, featuring the collaboration between Color Green’s Corey Madden and Ty Segall, FRECKLE, and of the moment post-country Chicago band Truth or Consequences New Mexico’s EP THIS TIME OF YEAR!
Truth Or Consequences New Mexico – THIS TIME OF YEAR
Genre: Countrygaze, Post-Country
Favorite Tracks: “Honey, We’re In Hell!” “Between GA,” “Seed of Doubt”
There’s just a lot to digest about Truth Or Consequences New Mexico’s sound. The first two songs off of their debut EP, THIS TIME OF YEAR, will tell you they sonically deserve to be discussed with the likes of Twine or Greg Freeman or Lily Seabird or Wednesday—artists whose expansive and frollicking noise rock is defined by blown out country edges and fried wind-up vocal performances. “Honey, We’re In Hell!” buries Jack Parker’s vocals in an avalanching mix of heavy fuzz and center-of-the-mix guitar soloing, landing somewhere between a crunchy arena rock anthem and a lonesome PNW bar song. “Standing Still” might have the aching slide guitar of a country standout, but it hits with the pop fever of a hometown native like Liz Phair. And closer “The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics” is perhaps the EP’s most straightforward and arguably accessible rock song, less focused on art rock frills and instead honing in on Cora Pancoast’s hopeful but heartbreaking performance; her and Parker’s stirring harmonies offer about as pitch perfect a closing moment to a debut EP as you could ask for.
If those opening tracks offered easy points of comparison to understand the band and their touchpoints, what remains focused on differentiating that sound from a now extremely crowded group of peers. A cynic would say that Truth Or Consequences New Mexico still have a ways to go in that regard—after all, as the age old adage goes, every time a shaggy haired late 20something in a Dinosaur Jr. shirt asks to bum a cigarette outside of a dive bar, a new MJ Lenderman picks up a guitar. But the bubble hasn’t burst yet, and I think the thing I find most exciting about Truth Or Consequences New Mexico is that while the previously mentioned sonic comparisons are certainly in the DNA of this band (Parker and Pancoast’s vocals alone will lead you to these similarities), really it’s a handful of Chicago touchpoints that inform their music. There’s a touch of Jeff Tweedy to it all—it’d be frankly strange if there wasn’t—but specifically they exist in the shadow of Ratboys, whose self-described “post-country” sound has remained remarkably singular despite a boom in recent years of twangy indie rock stars, drawling singer-songwriters, and outright countrygazers. There were your Waltzer’s and your ROOKIE’s and your Twin Peak’s and now there’s your Truth Or Consequences New Mexico’s. It’s an EP that rightfully has had a lot of the cool kids sharing it around. Give it a listen over on Bandcamp!
Freckle – S/T
Genre: Garage Rock
Favorite Tracks: “Who’s Sitting on the Moon,” “Heavy,” “For the Last Time”
Each and every Ty Segall project is, itself, an exercise in refining and refracking rock’s many technicolored edges into something boundless yet familiar. Sometimes that means he’s making bellowing metal riffs or doomy psych rock, and oftentimes he’s just riffing on garage rock classics or cooing classic rock melodies in the tradition of The Beatles or Pink Floyd.
When I last wrote about one of Segall’s projects now five (!) years ago, it was for Wasted Shirt, his collaboration with Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale. That project feels like a far cry from his latest, a collaboration with Americana maestro Corey Madden, whose work in the Los Angeles quartet Color Green has a warped widescreen country vision to it. Where Chippendale often acted as a true artistic force of nature, pushing the boundaries of what Segall would’ve ever seemed capable of in his solo projects, Freckle harkens back to a simpler sound for the prolific musician. There are moments of roots rock porch jamming, perhaps the obvious theoretical endgame for this project on paper if you’ve heard Color Green before—”I Don’t Know What I Need” is a groovy, tight backyard jam, and closer “That’s All We Wrote” is a charmingly slapdash piano led epitaph—but by and large this is just a back-to-basics sound for Segall, with some of these songs sounding like the cleaner garage rock lite tunes that began to make up his work back around GOODBYE BREAD nearly 15 years ago; ”Paranoid,” “Who’s Sitting on the Moon,” and “Heavy” especially (those layered vocal harmonies!) are each classically Ty Segal in all the right ways, but also in ways that are almost needlessly nostalgic. Afterall, it’s not as though he’s really gone anywhere—each new album of his has at least one of these types of tracks on it, even as his sound has grown proggier and less contained over recent years. But you hear “For the Last Time,” with its big, signature guitar solo at the center, and it’s about as tried and true a Ty Segall tone as you could hope for if you’re a fan, and listening to him duel with the piano soloing just on the other side of the mix is absolute brilliance. If anything, Madden as a collaborator forces Freckle to be met on refreshed terms, and that does the project (and Segall) a great service. You can check it out over on Bandcamp!
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