[rating=4.00]
To say an artist has hit his stride is to hint that the road ahead is an easy, straight path, but maybe Ted Leo is due a little comfort. With all its dollar-loaf white bread sandwiches and fitful couch sleep, Leo’s road has allowed him to grow gracefully. His sound has always been his own, but since Shake the Sheets in 2004, his hardcore roots have branched to a complete musical tree, and The Brutalist Bricks brings Leo’s pop and soul buds to full flower.
The hardcore troubadour of Chisel and Sin-Eaters still wails on the opening “The Mighty Sparrow” and “Mourning in America,” which growl low before barking like an angry dog on a short chain, but the opener’s acoustic breaks and guitar solo hint at more than just gritting teeth and grinding power chords. The singalong choruses of “Even Heroes Have to Die” and “Bartolomeo and the Buzzing of Bees” are contagious, and “Bottled Up Cork” blends punk fury and pop optimism into a globe-trotting hardcore soul anthem that may be the best pop song he’s ever penned. “One Polaroid a Day” stretches Leo’s lower register to its limit, but the hand-clapping bridge and the chorus’ hook turn his limitations into an easy-to-swallow wake-up pill for mainstream media.
Anyone who has seen Leo perform at the tail end of a tour knows that he is rarely perfect, but always perfectly sincere. The integrity evidenced in his career path is quintessential to his music, and after a run of four excellent albums, maybe now is the time for some ease to explore the deep-track sound of “Tuberculoids Arrive in Hop,” a well-placed surprise on an album that tends towards the two extremes of Strummer-esque pop-punk and Leo’s own hand-crafted hardcore sound of “Where Was My Brain,” the hardest and possibly best track on The Brutalist Bricks. Hitting one’s stride in the age of internet music media means that it’s easy to be overshadowed, but it also means it’s easy to be oneself, and we’d never ask more of Ted Leo than that.
