The seemingly enigmatic marriage between country and punk was first consecrated in the late ‘70s and early’80s with bands like Rosie and the Screamers and The Gun Club, where more adventurous groups started picking elements from the seemingly disparate genres and finding common ground with each making for a hybrid that is still around today. In from Olympia, Washington’s Pigeon Pit,
you can hear elements of everyone from the Violent Femmes and Old 97s to Social Distortion in the latest Crazy Arms, their fourth LP. Despite moments of beauty within the harmonies and music, it is still a soundtrack to truly uncertain times.
Centered in the now, under a backdrop of rising global fascism and AI battling it out with reality, the band is focusing on how to keep sane and still love and have fun in these dark and get darker days. “Keys to the City,” for example, is about living in a city that can be dangerous at times but still managing to have fun. With fiddle and slide guitars, the band stretches out wide musically on the track. Conversely the very next song, “Josephine County Blues,” is a much more reserved song, but just as impressive.
The opening track, “Bad Advice,” has echoes of The Violent Femmes, while songs like “Alone in the Basement (For August)” or “Bronco” have the lyrical eloquence of a Greg Gaffin/Bad Religion song (“Every moment, like broken glass, a holding cell, a furtive glance, falls in squares of light across an empty bedroom floor”). It’s the band’s ability to meld their disparate influences from all six members with literate but often fun lyrics that make the music so compelling.
The band went into recording Crazy Arms after the busiest year since their founding. They toured for the first time as a full six-piece, played high-profile gigs, like their first Tiny Desk show, played with Laura Jane Grace, and toured Australia and New Zealand. Despite obvious signs of the band’s growing popularity, they still tapped into their DIY roots in recording this one, using a friend’s basement as their studio.
“Working with all these insane restrictions forces you to get creative and gives the thing you’re working on a sort of living character. It gets fucked up through the process, like a kid becoming a person. It’s more country than the last one, it’s more pop punk, it’s more experimental, it’s more of everything. I’m just having fun with my friends,” vocalist Lomes Oleander says, summing up the nature of this record.
