Picture a mobster at an Italian café in Providence, Rhode Island, on an ordinary August day in 1955. It would be the last day for George “Tiger” Balletto, who was shot in the back of the head with just an orangeade and vodka as witness—police, The Newport Daily News reported, “said they have found no one who admits having been present.” This was Deer Tick’s hometown back in the days of Raymond L.S. Patriarca, “the old man with bullet tips for eyes,” a New England mobster whose cigarette front business was called Coin-O-Matic.
Deer Tick lead singer and guitarist John McCauley was born in 1986, two years after Patriarca’s death. But local history, including the region’s dead mobsters, Irish Catholic community, state prisons, and shuttered Italian restaurants, looms large on their new Coin-O-Matic. This is Deer Tick’s first self-produced album, recorded at home in Providence. To plan the record, the band first met at Old Canteen, another Italian restaurant that once hosted guests like Frank Sinatra and Providence’s mob-friendly mayor Buddy Cianci. It was immediately after this meeting that drummer Dennis Ryan was inspired to compose “507 Smith,” which begins dressed for a silent film and ends up beer-soaked on the floor.
It’s the most extreme example of the album’s balancing act, which uses the loose concept to set stage-y humor alongside more serious reflections on nostalgia. “Sweetest Things” embraces heartfelt traditional roots rock, with enough grit in the guitars to prevent it from veering into high-school sentimentality. In the jangly, melodic rocker “Mary Singletary,” horny adolescent longing reaches such a fever pitch that McCauley’s narrator fears death by falling piano—using vintage cartoon slapstick to take the piss out of Catholic guilt.
In a recent Rolling Stone interview, Deer Tick spoke about getting their act together when the crowds started to thin after the pandemic and professionalizing, even using Slack. Another record might have found the ballad in that process, dissecting, with Deer Tick’s gift for barstool poetry, their relationship with the strange, looming beast that is age. We get a version of it in the standout “Endless Loop,” where McCauley watches old mistakes return with the reliability of utility bills: “I used to think I was responsible/Now I’ll miss another burial.” Half-comic regret shadows “ACI,” the most nakedly Springsteen thing the band has ever recorded: a would-be heartland rocker where a robbery gone wrong lands the narrator at the Adult Correctional Institutions of Rhode Island. Yet another form of regret kicks in on “Exit Door” as McCauley extends sympathy for “favorite restaurants” that have closed and for the “dinosaurs” no longer “stopping around.”
If this is your first time listening to a Deer Tick record, you will never guess the rambunctious, let’s-get-fucked-up energy of their earlier albums. Coin-O-Matic can feel a little like confessing to your small-town priest that he was right all along. At least it has the confidence to sound like it comes from somewhere. Following 2023’s Emotional Contracts, where producer Dave Fridmann injected a harder, radio-ready punch, Coin-O-Matic’s mellower Americana sound reflects a band at ease with itself, even when the tempos slacken and the organ gets buried in the mix. But though the lore is colorful and the affection for Providence unmistakable, Coin-O-Matic follows a similar script as older Deer Tick albums: a beer-swilling song paired with a somber one, neither fully inhabiting the space they claim.
