For half a century, jangly guitar pop has been a reliable delivery vehicle for both irrepressible joy and aching melancholy; it’s the musical vantage point from which a sunrise and sunset both look the same. But the songs of Toronto‘s Ducks Ltd. don’t so much deal in simple happy-sound/sad-lyric dichotomies as explore the symbiotic relationship between ennui and urgency. Since debuting in 2019, the duo of Tom McGreevy and Evan Lewis has been building a modest but sturdy catalog of songs that communicate the frustration of being stuck—in stagnant relationships, soul-crushing cities, a doomed world—with fleet-footed, blurrily strummed joie de vivre. If McGreevy often sings from the perspective of someone in desperate need of motivation, Ducks Ltd.’s excitable rave-ups function as the musical equivalent of a fitness app prodding him to close his rings for the day.
On their second album, Harm’s Way, McGreevy and fellow guitarist Lewis don’t do much to upset their winning formula; they just execute it with more militaristic precision. On the sprightly “The Main Thing,” McGreevy sings, “I've been sort of staying in my lane/Moving like the eyes in a painting”—a line highly reflective of a band firmly ensconced in its comfort zone, yet open to incremental yet impactful evolutions. For the first time, the musicians decamped from their makeshift basement studio in Toronto and recorded in Chicago, plugging into a local network of collaborators that includes producer Dave Vettraino (Deeper, Melkbelly), Dehd’s Jason Balla, and Ratboys’ Julia Steiner and Marcus Nuccio, among others. Ducks Ltd. remain hitched to a lineage that spans Antipodean ’80s indie greats like the Clean and the Go-Betweens and modern-day torchbearers like Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever; with its twangly guitar lines, picture-postcard scenery, and yearning romanticism, you’d swear “Cathedral City” was some bygone Grant McLennan gem. But the expanded cast helps Ducks Ltd. shake off the hermetic, home-recorded feel of 2021’s Get Bleak EP and its full-length follow-up, Modern Fiction, giving the songs more room to breathe and blossom.
You can measure Ducks Ltd.’s relationship to—and growing distance from—their influences in their choice of railway metaphors: Where the Go-Betweens once wistfully compared unrequited desire to a “Head Full of Steam,” McGreevy renders a doomed partnership as a crash-bound “Train Full of Gasoline,” a song that aptly barrels forward like a runaway locomotive. Pretty much everything else on Harm’s Way is firing at an equally heightened level. The pacing is jacked up, the guitars sparkle brighter, and the harmony-rich choruses soar higher than before, even as the words sting more intensely: “Hollowed Out” is a song about emotional emptiness that will nonetheless fill your heart, while “A Girl, Running” frames its crestfallen portrait of relationship dysfunction and codependency (“She falls apart before me/And then I fall apart right back”) with shimmering guitar fanfare that conjures the giddy Breeders chestnut “Divine Hammer.”
Packing nine songs into 28 fat-free minutes, Ducks Ltd. approach Harm’s Way like a merciless personal trainer: After one mad dash ends, they permit nary a second of rest before initiating another. But they do provide a comedown breather with the closing “Heavy Bag,” where McGreevy and Lewis settle into the acoustic idyll of a rainy-day Belle and Sebastian ballad, before a swell of strings and encroaching cloud of distortion summon the rhythm section for a casual cruise to the finish line. It’s a classic encore move, the sort of gradually ascendant tune where you can imagine McGreevy and Lewis waving goodbye to the crowd as their backing musicians play them off. But coming at the end of a record overflowing with existential malaise and anxious energy, the stress-relieving “Heavy Bag” feels less like a calculated curtain-closer than a necessary act of self-care.
