In spirit, Deer Tick aren’t much removed from the perennial weekend warrior bands you can always find at frat parties and local bars in college towns across the country. In fact, that’s always been part of Deer Tick’s charm. For better or worse, the Providence, R.I. quartet has remained about as unpretentious as rock bands come, even as it’s gotten tighter and more seasoned. Over the years, under the leadership of bandleader John McCauley, Deer Tick have been able to delve into acoustic stylings (as well as feedback- and beer-drenched Nirvana covers under the name Deervana) without sacrificing their straightforwardness or their scruff.
There’s something to be said for not trying to be anything other than what you are. But it’s still pretty gutsy of McCauley and company to try and hold an audience’s attention for two whole albums in one shot. With Deer Tick Vol. 1 and Deer Tick Vol. 2, the band releases its first new material in four years via two separate companion discs that differ stylistically but are meant to go together, as their album artwork depicts, like ketchup and mustard. They intended to make a third album (would that have been the relish?), but the fact that they visualize their music as a condiment rack lets you know off the bat that they didn’t get carried away trying to do too much.
At 10 songs apiece, the albums are sorted so that you can easily identify them as “the acoustic one” (Vol. 1) or “the electric one” (Vol. 2). That decision comes as no surprise given that Deer Tick have spent much of their career dumbing themselves down on several levels. And while it makes sense to group the songs that way for the sake of the individual listener’s preference, keeping the two modes separate prevents Deer Tick from delivering what could have been their answer to Wilco’s Being There. To be clear, Deer Tick don’t aspire to the same grandeur as Wilco, but taken as a whole this new body of work certainly isn’t lacking in texture.
Both albums include songs that lean in the direction of the other album. It’s easy to imagine the acoustic number “Card House,” for example, as a blustering electric guitar stomp, its boozy cadence balanced precariously between swagger and stagger—that crucial hinge point, perhaps, where the evening tips over into one drink too many. With its mandolin part locked in a kind of tango with an acoustic guitar on the other side of the stereo field, “Card House” reveals that somewhere along the way Deer Tick crossed over from a millennial version of the Replacements to something far more nimble in spite of themselves.
On the flipside, the electric instrumental “Pulse” features departed keyboard player Robbie Crowell, whose bittersweet piano, organ, and saxophone lines fill the song with a tenderness so complete it requires no vocal to get its feeling across. In the past, Deer Tick extolled the virtues of drinking and drugging to the point where they came across as caricatures, but there was always a sad-clown’s kind of sorrow in McCauley’s voice—even before real life hit him like a ton of bricks, a set of personal woes he channeled into song on the band’s last album, Negativity.
Since then, McCauley cleaned up, got married, and became a father—life changes that actually zapped his motivation to be in a band. Thankfully, he still has a lot to say, and his outlook, though more settled, still exudes the same uncertainty and fragility that, in a sense, rescued Deer Tick from themselves. If he’d never shown us who he really was, Deer Tick’s party schtick would’ve gotten old (if it wasn’t already old from day one). But with Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, McCauley solidifies his status as a modern-day barstool poet. “Somewhere in a fog/Of a million pleasantries/I kept my secret safe inside,” he sings on the acoustic ballad “Sea of Clouds.”
McCauley’s raspy crow often overwhelms the more delicate material, but throughout both albums, the band varies its rhythms and arrangements with surprising agility. “Sloppy,” for instance, re-imagines Nirvana as Southern-fried blues rock, while “Hope Is Big” allows us to picture what Billy Joel might have sounded like had he been born south of the Mason-Dixon line. Which is not to say that Deer Tick pretend to play country. Their music is, in fact, refreshingly devoid of twangy affectation. Apparently, Deer Tick still know who they are as they gently push against their limits. In the face of those limits, Deer Tick Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 never fail to be engaging.
