With their radiant warmth and cracked, spidery riffs, Chicago jangle-rock band Cafe Racer sound a bit like a sidewalk on a summer day. For a while, they seemed perfectly content to stroll: On their second album, 2018’s Famous Dust, they shuffled along at a leisurely pace, guided by singer Michael Santana’s staticky whisper-sneer. It was a vibe, but the songs didn’t always move with confidence—some had one chord change too many, one true change too few.
Their third album, Shadow Talk, doesn’t just leave those critiques in the dust—it’s also the rare case of a band that sounds entirely aware of how much better it’s gotten. Cafe Racer are now bigger, sharper, and far more flexible. While Santana still sings as though from behind Jim Reid’s and Jason Pierce’s sunglasses, he also doesn’t hesitate to tear them off for the occasional towering ripper and bark some heavy-sounding words, pushing his full weight into “boulder” and “vulture” on “Seminal Art.” Behind him, bassist Rob McWilliams and new drummer Elise Poirier hum in the shadows. They do heavy lifting without breaking a sweat; when the rest of the band violently crashes down around them in the middle third of “Exile,” they keep the whole thing up while hardly raising their voices.
Still, the best part of Shadow Talk is its gestalt: The individual pieces are all a notch stronger, but their sum is a ton stronger. Credit not only Cafe Racer’s conviction to rewire their love of fuzz with new energy, but also the album’s phenomenal sequencing. Subtle but firm, Shadow Talk’s motion mirrors time and weather: the first three tracks sound like a lucid morning becoming a focused afternoon, then gliding into a depressurized evening. Midway through the 10-minute closing track, a sustaining organ slips in unannounced, the whistling breeze that gently informs you that you have about four minutes before it turns into a droning downpour.
Shadow Talk is soluble yet rock-solid; it evaporates and re-materializes with ease. For a five-piece like Cafe Racer, grasping this slippery balance doesn’t happen by accident. It can take years of trial and error, the kind of long-term conditioning made possible by the independent venues where the band came up—venues that suddenly find themselves endangered. Shadow Talk is a victory made possible in part by artistic incubators like the Hideout, the Empty Bottle, and Beat Kitchen; it’s heavy but fitting that the album now takes on additional meaning advocating for their survival.
