Do you know that Vermont is certainly one of 4 U.S. states the place billboards are unlawful? Because of this, Upstate New York highways close to the Vermont border have tons of billboards: one for a cow-themed nation retailer sandwiched between one for a intercourse store and one with an image of a fetus and a name for sinners to repent. One thing haunts these highways and the cities they join, making the area as surreal as it’s scenic. Again once I was going to school in Vermont, ceaselessly touring between there and Albany, my associates and I’d typically trek by way of the snow to the one bar on the town, the place, on some nights, we’d watch farmers and truckers sing karaoke. I’d heard a rumor that certainly one of our professors was banned from that bar for preventing, and one other, much less confirmable rumor that the identical professor was banned from singing karaoke within the state of Vermont.
These are the sorts of tales that may match proper right into a tune by the 27-year-old Burlington-based musician Greg Freeman. In his slices of life in unassuming New York locales like Rome and Rensselaer, the larger Upstate space turns into the Wild West, its panorama the backdrop for thrilling highway songs, crime dramas, and ghost tales.
Not each nice album hits on the primary hear, however Freeman’s second file, Burnover, in some way feels prefer it’s at all times existed. He attracts from most of the identical influences as his friends in an indie rock panorama that’s taken renewed curiosity in nation and slacker rock however provides these genres a way of momentum and verve. Freeman’s tackle alt-country amps up the drama, whether or not he’s trafficking in historic fiction (“Burnover,” “Wolf Pine”) or first-person heartbreak (“Gallic Shrug,” “Sawmill”). To name slacker rock “pressing” or “emphatic” would possibly sound like an oxymoron, till you do not forget that the best works the style has to supply are ones whose disaffected supply and seemingly banal particulars reveal a profound tenderness. Freeman is sometimes nonchalant however by no means apathetic. His similes likening want to “a pie on a windowpane” or remorse to “a cork stabbed into your wine bottle’s mouth” transcend non-sequitur, turning into momentary worlds unto themselves.
It’s straightforward to find Freeman on the map his musical forebears have laid out—not as a result of he’s taking part in an imitation sport, however due to how his songs faucet into their most timeless instincts. He’s received Warren Zevon’s savage, thrill-seeking pen and ear for dissonant grooves; Jason Molina’s stability of softhearted blues with rugged outlaw nation; Jeff Mangum’s penchant for surrealism and sound collage; Stephen Malkmus’ expertise for saying a lot like he’s saying nothing; and Bruce Springsteen’s chameleonic magnetism as he morphs from a cowboy crooner to a lounge singer to a world-weary heartland rocker. Freeman has sufficient swagger to drag off a come-hither line like, “You’re a crescent moon now however I do know you, woman/I do know your darkish majority,” or a “John fuckin’ Henry” namedrop (given the songwriting lineage he’s in, mentioning the legendary steel-driving man is all however a ceremony of passage). There’s solely a lot self-seriousness one can preserve whereas shouting “Guitars! Guitars! Guitars!” to announce a rubber-burning guitar solo that spins out into honking distortion and brass ribbons, as Freeman does on “Gulch.” When faraway keyboard tinkering and mournful strings give technique to the outro of “Rome, New York,” his voice grows thinner and extra determined, singing, “Heaven, like a ditch, will typically spill into the road at night time/To pacify the muffled desires of the broken-into automobiles.”
