“The universal resides in the particular”: words of Matthew Milia, always the soul (and pen) of Frontier Ruckus. The car park of a petrol station, the tills of a DIY shop: telling the most anonymous detail, among the folds of everyday reality, to try to grasp a meaning therein. “The more specific you are, the more the universal somehow emerges.”
This is how, in a career spanning over fifteen years, Frontier Ruckus have managed to draw a sort of sentimental cartography of American suburbia. Today, after a long break from the previous “Enter The Kingdom”, the Detroit band (now in trio format, since Anna Burch decided to go her own way) returns with its album number six. And it is the perfect opportunity to rediscover that nostalgic songwriting, lost in some corner of Michigan in the company of the shadows of Elliott Smith and Okkervil River, which has now become the hallmark of Milia and co’s songs.
L’incipit of “Swore I Had A Friend” immediately puts into play all the most classic samples of the group: the framework of the banjo, the colors of the wind instruments, the spectra of singing saw, the defenseless tone of the voice. It’s as if Frontier Ruckus, this time, had decided to simply be themselves: “At a certain point we understood that we would never sell a million records, that we would never become the next Wilco”, confesses Milia. “My voice would always be too nasal, I would never stop writing about Michigan in my lyrics. And we, as a band, were not willing to change any of that.” That’s why the Frontier Ruckus, after the ambitions indie of chapters like “Sitcom Afterlife”, they seem to want bring everything home. It is no coincidence that the birth of “On The Northline” was made possible by a campaign by crowdfunding on Kickstarter: a choice that contributed to further strengthening the bond with the most faithful followers of this small stars and stripes cult.
From the song that gives the album its title, the heart of the new songs is the shadow line of the transition to adulthood. Once upon a time there was adolescence, when fixing one’s life and putting on braces both seemed within reach: then, however, the years pass and the teeth begin to inexorably become crooked again as before, in a sort of existential continental drift… “Fifteen years after the high school braces lift,” Milia sings, “The tectonic molars and incisors start to shift.” Panoramas of Midwestern entropy flow through the window – old McDonald’s signs and abandoned golf courses – while one’s reflection bears witness to the passage of time: “A ten-year-older version of you/ Kneels in the dark ditch/ And shows you what is real”.
“On The Northline” is a succession of bittersweet melodies and backlit polaroids, which Milia’s calligraphy fills with meticulous captions. “Clarkston Pasture” invites her to join the chorus with a more sustained pace, “The Machines Of Summer” slides towards country-folk horizons, the chiaroscuro remmiani of “I’m Not The Boy” lead to a trumpet coda à la Belle And Sebastian.
“What I love about getting older,” Milia always reflects, “is that you start to become forward-thinking about the bigger picture of your life span.” And her life has gone through a lot of changes in recent times, from marriage to fatherhood. “First Song For Lauren” is dedicated to his wife, the barest episode of the lot, a ballad for voice and guitar recorded on the fly on an iPhone in the urgency of falling in love, when the very possibility of happiness seems so fragile that it could dissolve in an instant (“Nothing will ever scare me/ Like the chance of something good/ When it seems like it’ll happen”).
True love, however, is what comes afterwards, when you find yourself looking into each other’s eyes one morning, to the soft notes of “Mercury Sable”, still unable to give a name to what has happened to your life, yet almost incredulous of the road traveled together. “And I’m sorry I can’t make sense/ Of something so completely intense”: perhaps one day we will find that name, and then we will feel like we have always known it. We’ll laugh about how stupid we were, and about that house we wanted to buy before we got too old.
04/22/2024
Tags: Frontier Ruckus Northline OndaRocks Reviews
