A sprawling, edgy, noisy double album veering from dark Americana to full-on indie-rock.
All Set The Bone is the record of a life disrupted. With his breakthough album, Burnout, barely completed, Greg Freeman left behind a string of low-paid jobs in his long-time home town of Burlington in Vermont and committed to his music full-time. That commitment saw him relocating, or dislocating, to “a middle-of-nowhere part of the Southwest” and recording his new album in Los Angeles under the guiding hand of storied, Grammy-winning, indie-rock producer John Congleton (St Vincent, Death Cab for Cutie, Mountain Goats).
How much credit Congleton can take for driving Freeman into an even bolder version of 90’s alt.rock than his previous two albums can be debated, but this album goes beyond the usual indie totems of Modest Mouse or Pavement and at times evokes the lesser-referenced influence of Fugazi, Guided By Voices or Built to Spill. Like these antecedents, electric guitars, drums and bass are doing a lot of the heavy lifting across the thirteen tracks, but piano, keyboard, strings and brass all make their presence felt. It doesn’t sound like anyone gets to just turn up and play on a Greg Freeman album. There’s a commitment and intensity in every contribution: guitars squeal, drums thunder and the piano stabs out arpeggios and arresting runs with real ferocity.
Freeman’s vocals are also notched up several levels. A witty, shrewd and observant lyricist across all his output, on his latest album Freeman sings lyrics coloured with vividly unsettling imagery in an even shakier, creaking falsetto that invokes Neil Young at his loosest. If the melody lines wobble, make no mistake, there’s nothing timid or held-back here. Freeman sounds like he means every single word.
The album opens with the blistering Cahokia, with Freeman musing on the fleeting glory of a society’s greatest achievements as the band slash and burn their way through hook after hook, with the piano line especially embedding itself in the brain. Totaled properly rocks out over the wreckage of a pickup truck, while Culture slips back the intensity just a touch, with insistent punchy guitar chords interwoven with more of these clever little understated piano lines before the grunging-out intensifies into a defiant chorus bemoaning “No culture and no more rock’n’roll”.
Despite plenty of weirdness applied, song after song lodges in the memory demonstrating that Freeman is a gifted songwriter who knows his way around a great hook. He’s stretching himself here and revelling in his work, with a band that’s more than capable of going the distance alongside him.
It’s fair to say that All Set The Bone, benches Freeman’s americana influences to crank up the noise and intensity, but the album closes with Bury Me the Shovel, a fabulously meandering country-tinged ballad that hopefully indicates that there’s still more americana in the tank as he moves forward. Don’t be surprised to see All Set the Bone on plenty of end-of-year lists.
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