Review Summary: Aimless melancholy
A 90s alt-country album named for my beloved home state, I wanted to love this album, but all I found was a mixed bag. I will give these boys that they nail what I consider to be the quintessential alt-country sound - dry production, rich acoustics and raunchy electric guitars with nice coloring from keys and pedal steel. In fact the instrumentals here are consistently quite good if nothing unheard of. The problem lies in songwriting and bloat. Joe Pernice’s lyrics are melancholy enough but don’t bring quite enough to the table to be worth coming back to, especially when they’re fit to rarely interesting and sometimes awkward melodies and singing that’s just a bit too rough for me. Don’t get me wrong, some of the best alt-country vocalists (see Will Oldham, Matthew Houck and Jason Molina) can do wonderful things with a hesitant warble and voice cracks, but Pernice is far from their level. As for structure, at 14 tracks and 54 minutes, the album runs far too long; culling the material a bit more could have resulted in a more digestible 10-song, 40-minute listen that would have alleviated some of the fatigue that comes with the consistent sound and themes. It doesn’t help that the album is frontloaded either. The first 5 or so tracks consist of most of the album’s best material. The sub-3-minute “In a Ditch” and “Penthouse In the Woods” are both tight tracks that indicate the band works best with short tunes. Even better are “Big Hole” and “Grudge F
uck”, the former featuring a tasty acoustic riff and the latter being the closest
Massachusetts comes to a classic tune. With an almost Beatlesque, soft-rock sound it features strong piano playing, a rich bassline, the album’s strongest guitar solo, and its best set of lyrics (not to mention the awesome title - which unfortunately seems to in most editions be censored as “Grudge ****”). It’s enough to indicate
Massachusetts could have been a great album, but nothing else comes even close, and what you’re left with is one playlist-worthy track on a disc that’ll entertain you for a few spins before finding its way back to the shelf. Go listen to
Strangers Almanac instead.
