Modern Baseball were a band of the people: total transparency was a major factor in their success and perhaps the biggest in their recent decision to take a break. On 2016’s Holy Ghost and in its making-of documentary, Brendan Lukens and Jake Ewald were as upfront about their struggles with substance abuse, mental illness, and exhaustion as they were about the nuances of social media and high school heartbreak. But unlike before, airing it out on stage every night was a problem, not a solution. And so in September of 2016—with the first album from his project Slaughter Beach, Dog—Ewald began distancing himself from Modern Baseball by writing about someone other than himself. While he constructed the fictional “Slaughter Beach” to combat writer’s block within his main gig, with MoBo now on hiatus, Ewald allows himself to play the lead role again.
If Ewald isn’t the narrator on Birdie, these guys sure have a lot in common with him. Ewald returns to reality in familiar settings—bonding over gin in apartments, nodding off while traveling to and from Philadelphia, Maryland, and Delaware (vis a vis a lyrical homage to the Promise Ring). “I love looking at your pictures, but I still wish that I’d brought more,” Ewald sings on “Bad Beer,” a tour diary and presumptive companion track to Holy Ghost’s long-distance love letter “Mass.” Compared to his past work, Ewald’s sonic and emotional palette are rendered in cooler shades, mostly amber and sepia. Birdie is a point on a familiar trajectory, literal post-punk in the manner of John K. Samson’s solo projects or Tim Kasher’s the Good Life. It’s a means for verbose songwriters to transition towards a more sustainable format, maintaining a sardonic edge to what might otherwise threaten to become cloying indie-folk.
In that regard, the chipper backup vocals and beaming geniality of “Pretty O.K.” test Ewald’s boundaries—yet it’s the shrugging sentiment of the chorus itself that becomes the most substantial, if unintended indictment of Birdie. The spare arrangements and easy tempos ensure that Ewald’s storytelling remains the focal point. But there’s a disappointing lack of conflict, or stakes, or sense that outcomes aren’t predestined to be pretty OK.
Ewald remains adept at cutting dialogue and creating characters with dimension: at the outset of “Pretty O.K.,” a formative friend named Luis is given a familiar outline (“his darkened room all full of porn and ICP CDs”), before Ewald gets to the core of his blasé outlook on life outside his father’s double-wide (“he had no middle name and no desire to go to college”). Meanwhile, in “Phoenix,” Ewald imagines a partner’s “strung-out” mother “making all the world her ashtray,” calling out modeling commands while taking photos—a powerful image that only serves as a digression, a character actor given an underwritten role. Without these cameos, Birdie’s midsection breezes by, both as pleasant and memorable as small talk with a friend.
Ewald seems quite capable of one day making a real statement as Slaughter Beach, Dog, and Birdie makes a case for the staying power of the project. He sounds just as comfortable in scratchy, one-take, four-track folk (“Phoenix”) as he does in easy country rock or spare slowcore. He’s found his voice as a musician, but he’s still searching as a writer, trying to find the sweet spot between autobiographer and novelist. It’s no slight to say that Ewald is still best at his most transparent, singing to the person right in front of him. Birdie is framed by “Acolyte” and “Gold and Green,” love songs that see Ewald accessing both a world-weary wisdom and earned serenity that was out of reach even two years ago. “Man, it cuts like a dull knife/When you’re young and you’re told/‘It makes sense when you’re older’/Darling let’s get old,” he sings towards the end of “Acolyte,” welcoming maturity in a most transparent way.
