In this late stage of December I've actually given up on the idea of any sort of remotely definitive Album of the Year rundown, evern though we're now down to my Top Five, as the last couple of weeks have brought some wonderful 2021 records to my notice and I'm fully confident that this will happen again before 2022 finally arrives.
The latest album of this sort to come to my attention is Keego Harbor by Matthew Milia also of Frontier Ruckus. Posted as Album of the Year by One Chord to Another the remarkable Finnish blog listed on the right hand side of this page. It's the stuff of dreams for writers and readers of Uncut Magazine.
By which I mean it's like a set of elegaic, lyrical and literate twenty or thirty something Americana reflections on the strange turns life takes. Richard Ford or Raymond Carver short stories set to weeping steel pedal acompaniment, with deeply and finely crafted songs that owe as much in terms of their sensibility to Fountains of Wayne as to Guy Clark.
This all veers to the warm rather than distraught lane of this particular highway. Keego Harbor,(the third smallest city in Michigan) is a set of vignettes of nowheresville suburbia. Songs about experiencing the rites of passage moments of early adulthood. Backed largely by the aforementioned steel pedal and the sweet, lush backing vocals of Milia's wife Lauren. It sounds like Gram and Emmylou have decided to relocate to Great Lakes country and start an Indie family.
It's all wonderfully done. An album that, if this is your bag, you'll want to return to many times. A textbook set of lessons in song writing, of what it feels like to grow up with the great, Mid-West American landscape as the spectacular backdrop to your life journey.
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