3 out of 5

Label: Temporary Residence

Produced by: Sanford Parker

By the time of Easy Pain‘s arrival – Young Widows’ 2014 album – I was a full-on fanboy. I can’t remember exactly how I’d lucked into Old Wounds when it released (though I suspect it was when I was exploring Kurt Ballou’s productions), but damn that record was exactly what I wanted to hear at the time. In & Out admittedly felt a little flat to me, but in time – and as a grain of salt lesson, post my reviewing of it – it became a constant relisten, absorbing where Wounds was abrasive. Then Easy Pain just kind of fulfilled everything: it brought back the group’s more immediate visceralness, but with the kind of songwriting maturity of In & Out. Whew. I may’ve owned Settle Down City previously, but regardless, backtracking through that and Breather Resist fleshed out the history, and then you could spread out to some related Louisville acts if you wanted something sludgier or folksier or etc., but I kept returning to Young Widows as my ultimate.

Jaye Jayle – YW’s Evan Patterson’s solo-ish “side” act – troubled me, mainly in the sense that I feared it would take away from his other band, despite the initial intentions of it being a way to work out tunes on the road. It also troubled me because… well, it really wasn’t my thing. There were definitely elements of Widows there, and I was able to appreciate the releases, but the style, tone, and production were far from something I’d keep in my rotation, whereas most of the other Patterson-adjacent projects at least had me wanting to play the albums through a few times.

And Jaye Jayle essentially evolved into a whole band and kept releasing, and Young Widows… didn’t. Which is fine. Bands run their cycles sometimes, and Easy Pain was a masterful work to go out on.

All to say: the announcement, after 10+ years, of an EP followup didn’t necessarily reincite my fanboy fervor. Things have changed. Time has – obviously – passed. And while the above rather explicitly states a bias going into the album, going back through their oeuvre chronologically I think (as impartially as I can listen) still tells a similar still to that bias, rather backed up by an interview with Patterson: Widows’ writing processes have evolved alongside the creatives, and we’re hearing exactly what this is: not the necessarily “logical” followup to the last album, but what these dudes sound like when playing together after a relative pause and pursuing families and side projects and etcetera. Combine that with the aforementioned evolution of Jaye Jayle, and, er, Power Sucker becomes the dad rock reunion of the band. For me, the sad truth is just that, had I heard this album first, I doubt I would’ve been wooed to go back; the workaday polemic lyrics and on-the-nose choruses / titles of tracks like Total Fucking Clarity and Call Bullshit have a kind of old-man-shaking-fist-at-clouds vibe, bristled up with a fuzzy bass sound and given the kind of audibly palatable pristineness producer Sanford Parker has gotten pretty great at bringing to the table. What once was anger, contained behind waiting-to-unleash tenseness or minimalist wallops of guitar / bass / drums is traded for a “back to basics” swagger. It all just feels, I dunno, obvious.

Now, to be clear, this doesn’t make this a bad album, or even a disappointing one, especially if the band continues to release with some more frequency. As mentioned above, it took me a minute to come around on a previous album, and that could certainly happen here. Also, my ears are probably locked in to a certain era of post-rock / metal that doesn’t want to grow up alongside Patterson et. al; I bet other listeners are down with these changes, especially if they’re Jayle fans. And the general Widows sound of reverby guitars and their staccato beats are intact, capably delivering solid tunes like Falling Bullet that have more of an Old Wounds get-in-get-out meatiness (if still a bit more wishy-washy in sound via Parker). So I’m not having a bad time with the disc. However, it’s the least impactful of their releases – even if I was chill in In & Out initially, it had its own sound – and I hope serves as maybe a post-Trump reactionary disc, getting some of the surface level thoughts and riffs out of the way for something more considered down the road.