By Ben Hohenstatt (@Hohengramm)
During a characteristically chilly New England winter, longtime friends Cooper B. Handy and Salvadore McNamara retreated to McNamara’s cold, smoky garage to record the first new Taxidermists album in nearly half a decade. Withdrawing into collaborative toil led to the twelve charmingly scruffy lo-fi rock songs that comprise the duo’s seventh album.
20247 sounds, in the best possible way, like an album that was bashed out by friends in a garage studio. There’s a thin and omnipresent layer of crackle-and-hum that presents all of the album’s simple, short songs in a context that feels just right and elevates the material. It’s proper garage rock in that way. And that stays true regardless of tempo.
While 20247 is devoid of sprawling epics, not every track aims to be a punchy rocker. “Love You,” has a bluesy smolder that sets it apart from everything else on the album, with sonic grain adding some extra pathos to Handy’s pinched vocals. Side one, track one, “Sweet Guilt,” which is also the album’s longest song, has a picked sound and herky-jerky momentum that’s hard to classify, it’s almost folky. While the slower tracks are enjoyable, 20247 really hits its stride when it picks up the pace.
Like photographing a vintage car with a film camera or listening to classic rock on vinyl, songs like “Good Job Done,” are an ideal match for Tiger Electronics-level production. The scuzzy, fuzzy quality augments the song’s best qualities, adding character to its bouncy riff, wordless backing vocals and erratic chiming that makes the song’s seesaw structure work. Album-closer “Let the Music Save Them,” an ode to escapism through music, pulls off a similar trick, stitching together bright, breezy verses with choruses that are both musically and lyrically moodier. “Talk about problems / You’ve got mine / In a world full of problems / We can’t push them aside.” The merrier moments get interestingly scuffed, and the darker sections pick up some actual menace.
“Grow Up,” is maybe the most straightforward rock song on the album, and not coincidentally it makes the absolute most of its lo-fi trappings. Lyrics about growing up are joined by guitar that sounds like it was recorded with assistance from the ghost of Dave Davies’ slashed amp. The delightful blown-out murk lends extra weight and oomph to 20247’s most propulsive track and credibly sets the stage for a legitimately badass drum fill from McNamara that happens to set up an improbable reference to the “double double this this” clapping game a lot of listeners will remember from childhood.
Lead single “Shoot” jams all of 20247’s charms into a barely 90-second package. It features prototypical garage rock riffing and spacier weirdness with something that sounds like a string break serving as a demarcation line between its two hemispheres. It’s another song well-served by its blown-out sound. When Handy and McNamara describe someone as “tired, exhausted, tired, tired, exhausted,” during the song’s slower stretches, the fatigue is made real in a way that a cleaner recording couldn’t match. It’s enough to make you hope they never leave the garage.