4 out of 5

Label: Iodine Records

Produced by: Doug Batchelder

Whew! A lot of my favorite bands have returned with albums after breakups / long pauses over the last few years, and while most have been good, the majority have been… well, good. As in not great. And maybe more relevantly: are not albums I’m apt to return to, unless I’m purposefully doing a whole discography listen. While some of these returns have had better followups, somewhat proving that there was rust to be cleaned off, it’s still something special when that long pause is broken by a legitmately great disc.

…Is Tales for the Rages, Piebald’s return, great? Okay, I’ll hedge a bit: it’s not their greatest, and if I’m ranking albums maybe it’s not in my top two (he says, carefully, hoping no one pressures him for such a list) but I have happily revisited this album multiple times over from the time of purchase, and it does the bestest things that Piebald does: it makes you want to singalong without it feeling cringey; you’re able to sing along almost immediately; it hits on riffs that get stuck in your head; it’s produced to the shiny, boppy nines; and if all of that isn’t indicative: it’s just dang fun. Tales for the Rages, that quippy album title included, is definitely the right album for Piebald to be making at this time, scratching some familiar itches, reaching out towards slightly punkier realms than their 20-year-ago last release while also tickling on the slightly less familiar – see Power Smile’s 70s glam touches – and evolving its subject matter to take a look at the modern social / political climate without refiguring the band’s sensibilities.

Yeah, maybe calling this a return is cheating, given the band’s X-Mas single a few years prior, and the occasional reunion show, and that it was recorded in bits and pieces since, er, 2019! But a holiday single is a pretty targeted, niche thing, live shows can run on nostalgia, and the latter just shows the band’s smarts in sitting on the material until they had a full, cohesive experience. So they did it: Piebald grew up, delivered an album that sounds like it’s from grown ups, but hits all the notes that a fan from two decades back could hope for. I smiled when the opening song kicked in, and though there are some “standards” peppered throughout, my smile got bigger when I was gifted several my-new-favorite singles on the album as well, meaning this absolutely gets slotted in to my regular rotation.