Six long years and here it is. Jake Mckelvie and The Countertops have finally released their third album. A moment I've been waiting on since approximately a week after a sweaty evening in 2014 at the Keene Local Burger in a month I can't remember, the guys wearing suits for a crowd of fifty or so college age kids and me and my friend at the time, Zoe. They played their new record Solid Chunks of Energy end to end, and then they play a few of the heat tracks. It's still one of the best shows I've ever been to. My name, my old name, was chanted at the end of the set. Suffice to say I've been waiting a while.
It's no secret that I'm a Jake Mckelvie fan of an old kind. I have lyrics from the first record tattooed on my back. It is safe to say more or less I have listened to everything this band has ever done and I mean that with no exaggeration. At all. I am their largest fan. My biases are clear. Solid Chunks was in a lot of ways a disappointment. the gulf between my love for their first record (my favorite album of all time) and their second effort was fairly sizable (mind you it had little to do with the songs on that album, many of which I have heard dozens of times at live shows and love, but the production). I had my trepidations going into this messianic album. After all these years, was it not like a light bounding over a hill? Was it not a rumor or a whisper at this point? My on going attempts to write music reviews like poetry, please bare with me.
What we get for our wait, dear friends, is another perfect Countertops album. Full stop. It's another stage in the Countertops evolution. This band is too tight and too skilled to pick apart the playing. Their veterans at this point. almost a decade into their existence as a band, slightly less with this lineup (again showing my age with a Jeff Hall reference). Here's What You Do takes the Countertops sound and expands upon it. Its really that simple. They shred harder for sure (my mind flashes to when Jake couldn't solo and the show where they opened up for Big D and The Kids Table at the Mable Brown Room where I saw Jake Shred for the first time live). The songwriting has more twists and turns. If their is any dull I feel for this album that's all on me. I am the one whose context has calcified, their skills and execution have only gotten better.
When I first heard the tops I was young, I still am but we'll clarify that ahead, I was living in Keene with them and saw them all the time. So much of the joy I got from their music was being a scene kid. I was an awkward and mildly friendless kid in highschool and loving their music, and dancing so hard to it, gave me a way to feel cool and apart of something. It was such a part of my life in those days. I'd get up to get ready for school in my families apartment on Marlboro street and I'd put on the first album and play it into the kitchen off my cd player, my mom dancing in the bathroom as she got ready for work. that's how I wracked up 300 plus plays of that record. These days the tops aren't so integral. I am a few heartbreaks away from those days. A lot more suicide attempts than I'd like to admit from those days.
It's a perfect album y'all. These days their music makes me nostalgic more than anything else. That's the bias y'all. That and I don't want to go on about jakes absurd lyrics... I've had that conversation countless times, writing about it would be like writing about the sky or the memory of my father. I have been living with Jakes words for so long. They are inseparable to how I think of lyrics. Can't really grade that on an axis of good and bad can I? Surely I can't. As I keep Listening to the album I am bolstered by a feeling of hope. That these things continue, the legacy of the good things we have in our lives can keep going. I might not be the same as I was, and hell back then wasn't idyllic. there was abuse and suicide then too. Its just that now I have to try and figure a way to move out of my moms house. frankly there's almost a sick cyclicality. Living with my mom on Marlboro street when the self titled came out and almost a decade later in a different house with my mom on Marlboro street when the new album comes out. I am wistful folks. this album gets ten out of ten wistful.
Its a great album. No one who knows me would be shocked to find me telling you listen to a Jake Mckelvie record. but then again this wasn't really an album review was it.
