Frontier Ruckus - Enter The Kingdom (Album Review)
Thursday, 23 February 2017
Written by Jacob Brookman
Michigan does a fine line in pop musicians. Alongside Madonna, Stevie Wonder, the White Stripes and Eminem, diverse cult heroes like Iggy Pop, George Clinton and potential Republican rivals for the Senate, Ted Nugent and Kid Rock, all have ties to the state. Nestled in this elaborate melange we also have folk-country innovators Frontier Ruckus.
Their fifth studio album, ‘Enter the Kingdom’ is a thoughtful journey through suburban Americana, combining gentle alt-country songwriting with elegant string accompaniment, candy floss vocals and deft, intuitive arrangement.
It’s a likeable album of familiar textures that demonstrates the lyrical talent of bandleader Matthew Milia. He's a writer who manages to navigate a shamelessly romantic disposition with a disciplined - even intellectual - approach to sentiment, in a genre that is too often drenched in it.
The standout moment is probably two songs that work together sequentially: Since Milford and Gauche. The former is a vocal-free composition that relies on fiddles and slide guitar to weave a path through quizzical, floating chords.
It leads into the following snarky ballad, which demonstrates Milia's wordy skill: "I’m chatty and bratty and a little precocious / I slather on the inimitable neuroses." It shows the band’s knack of combining unabashed lyrical smarts with musical simplicity, and recalls Wilco (whose drummer, Ken Coomer, acted as producer) and, tonally, early Neil Young.
Elsewhere, lead single 27 Dollars features tactile neotraditional vibes, with light satire (“With a senator as your benefactor / You got pretty good at cashing checks from the man.”) alongside a kind of suburban parochialism that delivers immediate nostalgia.
The best country music is often philosophically unambitious, focusing on folksy storytelling ahead of conceptual grandstanding, and Milia is a lyricist who respects this while clearly wanting to push his music to the genre’s edges.
But there’s also something a little disappointing here. The grand-sounding title track is the album finale and as such feels like it should be loaded with nitroglycerine. When it instead doubles down on cosy gentility, one realises that this is an record that never really gets out of third gear. 'Enter the Kingdom' has a lightness of touch that is warm and friendly, but it's also a little bit easy to ignore. A little bit too comfortable in its genre, perhaps.
Frontier Ruckus Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Wed March 08 2017 - YORK Fulford Arms
Thu March 09 2017 - GLASGOW Hug and Pint
Sat March 11 2017 - NORTHAMPTON Lamplighter
Mon March 13 2017 - BRISTOL Crofters Rights
Tue March 14 2017 - BRIGHTON Albert
Wed March 15 2017 - LONDON Windmill
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