Greg Freeman's third album, All Set the Bone, feels at its best and most nervy like an off-brand pressure cooker: too hot, bursting at its seams, rattling with kinetic energy. The Maryland-born singer-songwriter has a voice that often sounds like it's straining at its limits. Although he is ostensibly part of a growing indie rock revival that has been taking hold over the past few years, there is nothing particularly comfortable about the songs on this double album.
A restless sound
On Marooned, frantic stabs of guitar and drums create queasy unease. Opener Cahokia muddles up the catharsis of a great American road song, descending into proggy bedlam. His lyrics most often drum up anxieties big and small: “Who do you look to when you're all on your own?” he asks on Culture. “When all your heroes lost their microphones?”
Following Burnover
Freeman broke out with last year's Burnover, a set of taut story-songs that were at turns witty, delirious and devastating. His secret was in his ability to weld that literary streak to loud, bolshy, riff-heavy music that would not sound out of place on mainstream rock radio.
All Set the Bone is several orders more ambitious in its scale, and its songwriting is more imagistic and diffuse. The result is an impressive record but one that is less immediately appealing. Freeman wrote it while travelling through the US and reckoning with “a lot of change in my personal sense of … everything”, and that searching quality is audible in the final product.
All Set the Bone contains fewer fireworks than Burnover, but Freeman still has plenty of spark.
