Kirk Gauthier
I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s something very comforting about a Generationals album. Their music is steeped heavily in the familiar—pop music of the ‘70s and ‘80s—with a modern twist and fresh production. There’s something also very reminiscent of the ‘90s on Heatherhead, the band’s seventh album, that make this the perfect record to play whenever you’re feeling down. There’s something about its incessant energy that perks you back up immediately.
Favorite track: Death Chasm.
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Oh my sweet love
I know I’ll never get
To remind you of
The days that you regret
I’ll write these letter to you
I’ll throw your coffin shade
No matter what you said
When every waking moment
Is the place where you fall
Spare me your worst
Maybe if I stay a while
I saw you first
Standing in the peristyle
Find me just ten years older
Not much has seemed to change
How did you just forget
Oh my sweet love
I hear the curtain call
Disabuse me of
That notion after all
I’ll write these letters to you
Not much has seemed to change
No matter what you said
How could you be so cold, Eleanor
Why don’t you ring us up anymore
Where you been? I come whistlin’ in
And I don't turn around
They say I wish you don’t stay so long
I’m gonna need someone to rest my shoulder on
How can you say that it wasn’t worth doing
Hey now don’t turn around
Are you ok, dirt diamond?
Take me away, dirt diamond
How can you be so rich, talk so much shit
I saw you get so stressed over it
I know you play along, I remember the song
Hey now don’t turn around
They say I wish you don’t stay so long
I’m gonna need someone to rest my shoulder on
How can you say that’s another one down
Hey now don’t turn around
Are you ok, dirt diamond?
Take me away, dirt diamond
Lost in LA, dirt diamond
Take me away, dirt diamond
If you say it's not the reason, I’ll convince you
Every day you talk of things you’re dreaming of
When you’re so tired of broken pieces you can’t replace
I’ll confess to you, I think you paid enough
All this love you have
You may not feel again
And the things you thought were real you
Can’t hold on to
And if it kills my heart to think about
Just how good we had
To try to face the truth, you gotta give me lies
All this time they could take from you everything you have
And kissing off all those promises, they would love you up
But close your eyes and you wake too fast, and you and I can see it
Dark times, they could make you sad, but we lost souls can’t feel it
When you’re outside baking on the concrete, I could lift you
You and I can seal our fate
With what you’re dreaming of
All this love you have
You may not feel again
And all the things you thought were real you’re gonna lose
And if it kills my heart to think about
Just how good we had
To try to face the truth, you gotta give me lies
Hard times for Heatherhead
They’re cracking down on communal passwords
So I will go to my grave with a price upon my head
For all my days
But have I told you that I would
Perish if I never had met you
Don’t leave me to my desolate ways
I’d perish if I ever forget to
Leave that life in those desolate days
Got mixed up in the multiverse
Came back as a different person
So I will go to my grave
Without valid driver’s license to my name
Disappear with the evidence
Talk on the phone to a distant person
And take that phone to your grave
With a chardonnay for good measure
To your grave
And have I told you that I would
Perish if I never had met you
Don’t leave me to my desolate ways
I’d perish if I ever forget to
Leave that life in those desolate days
Ted Joyner and Grant Widmer knew they had balked before they even got home. In the Fall of 2021, Joyner and Widmer—for a dozen years, the beguiling garage-pop pair known as Generationals—wrapped the second of two sessions in Georgia for a new EP. They’d opted out of the process of file-sharing they had used for years. Choosing instead to cut songs straight to tape in Athens, a spiritual epicenter for their brand of twinkling tunes. The results sounded great, but they didn’t think their songs were actually that exciting or up to snuff. Why busy everyone else with the rigamarole of releasing a record when they weren’t convinced by it themselves? Joyner and Widmer scrapped the sessions, relieved. The decision, after all, did not represent some existential crisis for Generationals, some what-are-we-doing-here panic; it was, instead, a validation of trusting their process and respective enthusiasms, of releasing great records rather than churning out substandard “content.” Before the veto was final, Joyner and Widmer were working on songs they already knew passed that test.
Heatherhead is the winning result of that restart. Effortless and endearing, as settling as a long hug from an old friend, Heatherhead is not only the best Generationals album yet but also the one that, after all these years, finds Joyner and Widmer at last epitomizing their sound. These 11 songs are no-fuss, no-filler manifestations of Generationals’ bittersweet beauty, of would-be rock anthems made to feel like cozy sweaters. Maybe it’s the way the thick riff of the indelible “Dirt Diamond” frames a vulnerable admission or how the taut rhythm section of “Hard Times for Heatherhead” buoys a smitten plea, but this record at large feels like Joyner and Widmer digging deeper into the juxtapositions that have long made Generationals so compelling—distinct but familiar, wry but warm, soft but pointed. Heatherhead is the record Joyner and Widmer have been pursuing from the start.
All was not lost down in Georgia, it seems, as the act of recording in the same room seemed to shake something loose for Joyner and Widmer. With Joyner still in the band’s hometown of New Orleans and Widmer now in Wisconsin, they’d grown comfortable passing ever-evolving tracks back and forth, adding parts or offering suggestions to one another as albums steadily cohered. They’d done compelling stuff that way, too. But after abandoning those in-person sessions, they decided to commingle ideas earlier this time. Joyner escaped the Louisiana heat in June 2022 by heading north, the two rendezvousing in Madison with loads of demos. They augmented one another’s takes in real time, shaping songs that fell together like puzzle pieces. When a tornado ripped through Widmer’s front yard and left them without power for days, they took it not as a sign to stop but as an invitation to just enjoy still being the buds in Generationals, drinking warm beer and listening to an emergency radio together.
Back in their respective quarters, Joyner and Widmer went to work with multi-instrumentalist, producer, and pal Nick Krill (The War on Drugs, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Spinto Band), creating a cross-country file-sharing triangle. They moved quickly, finishing Heatherhead—their sixth LP, but first in four years—that way in a mere matter of months. Despite all their fretting a year earlier about making music together in a room, these songs somehow felt more conversational and lived-in, like two old pals throwing a few back and tunefully singing of toil and joy. The true circumstances are ironic, given that, for 42 minutes, you feel like you’re right there with them.
Indeed, these are the sorts of songs you want to stay with for a while, to crawl inside of and have a look around for all the crafty details. Notice the way the sizzling little riff seems to bounce between the walls of “Elena,” an enchanting collaboration with Sarah Jaffe that glows like a woodstove in a winter cabin. Marvel at the muted funk of “Eutropius (Give Me Lies),” particularly the way the byzantine drum lines percolate beneath Joyner’s cotton-candy falsetto. And enjoy the marvelous seesaw of opener “Waking Moment,” a song that squeezes a dozen dynamic shifts and at least half as many hooks into four minutes that are as cool as a breeze. You can do this with every song on Heatherhead, limn those bits that give these seemingly billowing tunes real ballast; you could, on the other hand, just let them surround you, seemingly simple pleasures abounding.
“Closer to your death than to your birth,” Joyner sings during “Faster Than a Fever,” his voice traced by spring-loaded drums and sighing keys. “You’re gonna be upset to miss your favorite part.” It would be tempting for a band like Generationals—now well into their second decade—to let such an anxious feeling override their instincts. That might mean putting out something they didn’t love or reinventing their approach to chase a fanciful trend. To the contrary, Joyner and Widmer now have a better understanding of who they want to be and how they want to sound than ever before. You can hear it in every distinct but familiar, wry but warm, soft but pointed second of Heatherhead—a perpetually renewing relationship that gave them the wherewithal to pursue these 11 songs, apart and then together and apart again.
Alvvays has always been great, but with this album they took it to the next level. Every one of these songs is lodged in my brain now, permanently (in a good way). s. moxley
As far as indie albums in the 2010's and beyond go, this is one of the most cohesive and emotive albums I've experienced looking back on it and is Jay Som's best album tokyonoir
The Seoul-based indie pop duo lean deeper into the interplay between dance and emotion on their second album for Beeline Records. Bandcamp Album of the Day Aug 31, 2023