Northern Town is a fitting title for this album. It feels like winter: cold, lonely, and daunting. It’s the third record from The Right Here, based in Minneapolis, MN, one of the northernmost cities in the continental US. The band play alt-country with punk undertones. The songs are a little more expansive than your standard punk thang, with more lament, longing, and arrangement, but with an independent spirit and group sing-alongs that pull it all together with a subtle sense of empowerment through the bleak times.
These are songs that begin in the dark corners of the neighborhood pub, slowly crawling toward the center-of-the-room action by night’s end. They often begin with a depressed tone that builds in energy, finding comfort against that backdrop of isolation and despair. As a fellow Minneapolitan, I jotted in my notes that this makes me miss Lee’s Liquor Lounge, a now-closed dive bar that frequently played this kind of music with an old timer atmosphere that truly matched the music. But that’s kind of a tangent because Lee’s was gritty and a little bit sad. Northern Town, for all its downer moments, ultimately feels hopeful despite the adversity.
There are definitely some somber sad ones scattered across the 10-track album (“Drinks and a Dress”) but there are also big rock churners and blue-collar anthems. Imagine some Replacements fans who get together and write songs inspired by Uncle Tupelo, Lucero, and Bruce Springsteen.
To me, this record is about accepting one’s fate. It’s about taking one on the chin, sometimes swinging back, and ultimately walking away and moving on. The band achieves a delicate balance between big, bold rock and vulnerable countrified punk that’s never too big nor too mellow. The sequencing tells the story well, though pause on every listen, feeling that the title track with its dramatic and cathartic build-up is more suited for the finish, instead of being the second-to-last song. As it stands, “Believe Believe Believe” repeats some of those same feelings, though with more guitar and, probably, the more hopeful tone note they aimed to close on – but it feels a little overshadowed by the song before it.
But that’s super nitpicky. It offers a nice experience. My only real knock is that it, perhaps, draws too heavily from its influences.
