It is a blessing and curse when a band nails their sound right away. Sheer Mag brought their devotion to the sound of ’70s hard rock to a new generation with their much-hyped mid-2010s EPs, thanks to lead guitarist Kyle Seely’s gleeful and technically impressive playing and singer Tina Halladay’s anthemic sing-a-long melodies that could unite a rally or a karaoke bar. You’d have to squint to see their songwriting evolve from those EPs to their official 2017 debut, Need to Feel Your Love, and 2019’s relatively clean-cut A Distant Call, where the main differences felt like Sheer Mag were able to afford nicer studios. On Playing Favorites, the studio still sounds nice, and the riffs and howls will still get cheers from the rock clubs. There are even a few modest attempts at sonic experimentation. Ironically, Playing Favorites’ few tries at changing up the Sheer Mag formula show the limits of this band’s abilities (or willingness) to evolve from the sound many people fell in love with a decade ago.
Playing Favorites is a how-to-survive-in-this-world album, full of declarations someone might make after the strictest of pandemic lockdowns gives them time to pause and think about how they would like to be treated. In the case of the album opener and title track, Halladay’s first step into happiness is to pack up the van and ride into the sunset with her friends, “Just like the old days, playing the same old songs.” A call to friendship, but maybe Sheer Mag is also getting ahead of the critics who may accuse them of repetition: What’s wrong with playing the same old songs?
Still, “Playing Favorites” is a wonderful showcase for Matt Palmer, Sheer Mag’s rhythm guitarist and lyricist who gives the band its power-pop canvas for the other members to add their heavy rock flourishes. “Eat It and Beat It” has several dirty, prog-like mini movements that drive Halladay to kick and scream through her tough love for the phony rockers who need to learn when to quit. As usual, the feeling of her vocals is more compelling than its literal meaning.
These opening songs are strong enough. Every descriptor you could imagine to describe Sheer Mag here—shimmering guitars, heavy riffs, classic rock boogie—could also apply to every past Sheer Mag album. Most of Playing Favorites struggle to add new sounds to their vocabulary. After a brief acoustic intro, “Don’t Come Lookin’” steps back into the Sheer Mag mid-tempo safety zone of a tipsy 12-bar twang that hinges on generic lyrics about a wishing well. “Golden Hour” also reads generic and worse, sounds muddy and loud, destroying any sense of dynamics that help build up a song’s tension and release. “Tea on the Kettle” is pretty with its power ballad twinkles and some actual lyrical imagery (“The old dog cried behind the bus/You stopped the car cause you hated to see him alone”) and “Paper Time” might be power-pop’s newest peak when it comes to songs about waiting for the newspaper to arrive. However, by the time we get to these songs towards the end of the album, the fatigue of listening to familiar riffs and howls starts to set in.
Playing Favorites is at its best right in the middle. “Moonstruck” is a dreamy and lovelorn cosmic country strut first written for a scrapped disco EP and gives this album its first sense of unique sonic identity. Maybe Sheer Mag should have released that EP instead since “Moonstruck” and the following multi-part experimental jam “Mechanical Garden,” featuring a blast of a Mdou Moctar guitar solo and flourishes by album producer, engineer, and mixer Hunter Davidsohn, feel like the only moments when the band are challenging themselves.
Minor changes aside, Sheer Mag’s mission for Playing Favorites, even now as part of Third Man, remains to put huge and catchy songwriting front and center. Sheer Mag succeeded again, though the band’s issue was never its inability to write compelling and accessible rock songs. As the title track suggests, Sheer Mag are still playing just like the old days and playing the same old songs that make you feel like you’re in 1975 or 2014. It’s not a loss for the guitar rock world. Still, there’s no need to pretend that consistency always justifies a lack of new ideas.
