It takes more than guts to dredge below rock bottom. Certainly some degree of bravery is involved, but also naked desperation and a disregard for personal safety, and maybe you don't wanna sink that far into the darkness anyway. Two Gallants' new album lives down there in the depths, their most defeated, defeatist statement. Its emotional timbre is best described as abysmal—and this from a band that has continually found virtue in failure and upheld self-loathing as a form of self-awareness.
There's very little virtue in We Are Undone, no emotional state upheld so much as examined and then discarded*.* It plays like a flag of surrender, singer/guitarist Adam Stephens and drummer Tyson Vogel sounding wrung out by their own integrity. Maybe it's a creative adaptation for a band born and raised in San Francisco: The city today, hypergentrified by web-enabled strivers and rich kids, bears little resemblance to the one that began nurturing their talents more than a decade ago. In its often inchoate roar, We Are Undone bears little resemblance to the laser-focus punk-blues of their earlier work. The songs just aren't as good.
The most satisfying callback to Two Gallants' halcyon, mid-'00s prime comes in the album's second half. "My Man Go" demonstrates the patience and melodic intelligence that incites 2Gs live shows into sing-and-sway mosh pits. "In the ruins of my night I can still pretend," Stephens sings over acoustic guitar, "close my eyes, see my life as it could have been." "Katy Kruelly" references 200-some years of American folk-music tradition, from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War to early 20th-century race records to '60s folk revivalism. As presented here, the song glows with Stephens' voice and acoustic guitar, as much a history lesson as a beautiful ballad of loss. It segues directly into "Heartbreakdown", another slow, somber number, literary in its lyricism and oozing regret.
"There's So Much I Don't Know" closes the album with an anti-gentrification anthem that's equal parts preservationist and xenophobic. City living in 2015 is a thorny subject; urban evolution is a process both inevitable and stomach-churning. In the case of San Francisco, wealthy people are displaced by even wealthier people—plains-bred newcomers "trying to make it rain." Two Gallants rightly addresses the issue in folk-song form, but Stephens' response is to begrudge, flee, and burn the city to the ground on his way out. Die-yuppie-scum middle fingering is an appropriate first response of the self-possessed dispossessed, but it can't be the last. "All things blow eventually/ There's so much I don't know," goes the chorus. I wish there were more to say than that.
Which is the overall sense the album leaves: The band wields the same righteous fury as always, regardless of a world evolving around them, without them. The only obvious shift within Undone is in Stephens' guitar tone, which occasionally takes on prog-ish, Malmsteenian melodrama—not necessarily for the best. That guitar roars into a satisfyingly ferocious riff on the album-opening title track, but thematically the song echoes "Waves of Grain" from their 2006 album What the Toll Tells, pitting a young idealist versus an aging cynic in a sort of epistolary folk-metal showdown. This time around the singer remains agnostic. Cynicism is realism. And that resignation hurts.
This band has articulated youthful frustration so well for so long but what comes next? What's below rock bottom? At least the jaunty "Fools Like Us" injects a dose of what-me-worry? haplessness into the album a few songs later. But otherwise, we're left hurt and hopeless. Nobody should have to live like that.
