SATURDAY SONGS TO SAVE EVERYTHING TO

My man Jeff Mueller has had three seminal bands that were/are all vastly unappreciated: Rodan, June of 44, and the still-active Shipping News.  Each of these groups had their own individual sound, but in a way one can trace the evolution of common member Mueller from one to the next.

Save Everything, Shipping News’ excellent 1998 debut album, seemed to culminate and refine the angular indie-aggressive sound the two bands before had begun in various rawer forms.  You can almost hear Mueller growing up from one outfit to the next.  How quaint.

Shipping News’ latest album One Less Heartless to Fear was released a couple of weeks ago; here’s the press description:

This is the band s first new full-length album since Flies
The Fields, and a helluva lot has happened in the last
five years two weddings, fatherhood, serious illness,
a presidential election, multiple wars, city moves, two
Batman films, and lots of time with friends playing songs.
These things seem to have inspired the band to make their
most aggressive and adolescent album to date. Shipping
News has jettisoned the long songs (and glacial tempos)
of the past to concentrate on energetic blasts of noisy
rock with a little gallows humor thrown in. While slipping
into a slightly more sympathetic mood once or twice, the
new songs are stripped down and pretty much nasty.

Woof.

-KW