slacker-rock

Rockingham County is in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, and Dogwood Tales have packed it into this album: a song named after Ralph Sampson, the town’s most famous basketball player; McDonald’s Coke and high school football in “McMemories”; a friend in tears over a plate of fried chicken in “Angel Dreams”. “Mt. Jackson” goes from Kyle Grim’s uncle in a hospital bed to the bills that follow. It’s an album of big feelings in small places.

MJ Lenderman, who has songs called “Dan Marino” and “Toontown”, is the obvious comparison, though Grim and Ben Ryan play their own “Ralph Sampson” and “Princess Peach” with a straight face instead of Lenderman’s wry smile.

They’ve played together since high school, when both were in pop-punk bands in neighbouring towns, and the opener, “Soundcheck Infinity”, looks back to practice sessions loud enough to draw parental complaints. Perhaps that’s where the touches of Midwest emo come from. Otherwise the debt is to Neil Young. For every pedal steel line there’s a distorted lead or a wash of shoegaze, and the songs mostly move at their own unhurried pace. The standout for me is “Shield”, the longest thing here at five minutes, which starts slowly before vanishing into a wall of fuzz.

The “cowboy punks” tag has been following National Photo Committee around, and it fits: all the instrumentation and song structure of a typical Americana band, with the slacker attitude turned up a few notches. The analogue is Tiberius’s farm emo; a genre tag self-applied with enough wink to deflect, accurate enough to stick.

The Chicago four-piece describe themselves on Bandcamp as a band “that sounds like they grew up in Virginia and got kicked out of college in Olympia,” which was enough to make me play the album immediately. The David Berman influence is everywhere, and perhaps it’s just the corner of music I’m currently in, but his ghost is loud right now. You can hear it in Max Bottner’s double entendres and wry lines delivered with a perfectly straight face. At one point a phone goes off mid-song and nobody seems bothered. Bottner’s deep baritone does most of the storytelling. The richness of his voice makes him sound older than his years, and you eagerly sit round and listen to what he has to say.

This sort of thing usually comes across as half-arsed or throwaway. Red Hot Photo Committee is neither. It’s a polished, serious record delivered with a glint in its eye and no small amount of swagger.