Spare Ribs cover

Spare Ribs

Released

They’ve been this good for five years, but not quite this good. I’m not sure where this is going to land in terms of history, since Jason Williamson has taken himself into a form of rock where he is the only rock and everything around him—Andrew Fearn’s beats—is so resolutely modest that it all sounds like a fold-down of music from some other world entirely. Williamson is singing about the suburbs in a way that reflects the pandemic without naming it. “Mork and Mindy” is the inner monlogue of someone at home, slowly losing his mind. And yet, on stage, the material becomes a football-level holler, pure adrenaline shooting up from a cramped space. A tiny packet of strawberry MSG with a manifesto written along the edge.

Sasha Frere-Jones

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