At this point in Sheer Mag’s five-year career, the Philadelphia four-piece has delivered more power-pop and heavy metal riffs than a Thin Lizzy cover band expo. Their face-slapping, fist-pumping anthems have sounded countless working-class and socialist rallying cries. By now, are we hoping for more of the same? Or are we ready for growth, their “weird” album, the kind that would shuttle the group from one vintage era to another, maybe a record with some ’80s-influenced keytar and 808s, alongside a ’90s grungy self-seriousness?
When a band is so deeply rooted in and influenced by an era long since past, progress can be hard to track. If you were to get no further than the first couple songs on their second full-length album, A Distant Call, you wouldn’t be blamed for believing that Sheer Mag was ready to give us more of that old school rock‘n’roll, rather than something riskier. “Steel Sharpens Steel” opens with lead vocalist Tina Halladay’s signature manic howl, kicking off a stomp-and-chant anthem about fighting the system that comes down like a sledgehammer. “Blood From A Stone” covers the injustice of living check to check in the land of milk and honey. They are perfectly serviceable and easily accessible follow-ups to 2017’s Need to Feel Your Love and Compilation LP (a collection of Sheer Mag’s first three EPs). Eleven or 12 songs like this would be good enough—after all, we could always use more thrashing workers’ rights anthems.
But A Distant Call is a slow, slow burn. It’s not until halfway through “Unfound Manifest”—an open-hearted reflection on the guilt and shame of feeling depressed while so many others have it worse off than you—that the band unleashes new depths. “I’m in my head and I’m feeling false,” Halladay sings over a bridge of warbly, undistorted guitar. That vulnerability, combined with the unfamiliar, looser, almost jazzier sound—more Fleetwood Mac or the Eagles rather than, say, Kiss—signals that something new has broken through. These songs are equally as ripe with earworm melodies as their others, but with components that are less obvious or easy to reach for. Sheer Mag has infused their typically punchy hooks with texture.
On “Silver Line,” a 12-string acoustic is complemented by a lap steel guitar and keyboard (a sentence I never thought I’d use to describe a Sheer Mag song) but it’s capped off with a monster electric guitar solo from Kyle Seely that shoots off into space. This is what progress sounds like. It doesn’t have to mean abandoning what defines you as a band. It’s the buffing of a rough diamond until it shines. Less lo-fi fuzz and more layered, compelling instrumentation underlay lyrics co-written by Halladay and Matt Palmer that touch on more personal themes like domestic abuse and depression. “The Right Stuff” is Halladay’s righteous message to anyone who might have critiques about her body size: “I don’t care what they see/I think of beauty differently/If you’re worried about my health/Shut your mouth and keep it to yourself.” A Distant Call is an album with depth of production, more deliberate songwriting, and a commitment to style.
The most notable change comes in Halladay’s raspy growl. This record was written after she was laid off from her job, out of a relationship, and mourning the death of a father with whom she had a complicated relationship. On previous albums, Halladay screeched as if her life depended on it, nearly cracking when hitting the high notes. Here, she is no less restrained, but the true tone in her singing voice comes through (helping matters, she recorded her vocals in a studio with producer Arthur Rizk rather than on her usual 8-track recorder). This change doesn’t weaken the band’s DIY spirit—they still self-release all their records and rail about communist uprisings and our corrupt government—but this upgrade to Halladay’s vocals allows those lyrics to shine brighter. On “The Killer,” she sings repeatedly, straight into an epic key change, “The Cold War never ends/It starts all over again/He’s got you right between the eyes/Waving the flag for human rights.” The better we can hear her, the more potent the message becomes.
If the scrappy early single “Fan the Flames” was the song to metaphorically grab the major label’s attention, A Distant Call sounds like the result of one of those lucrative multi-album record deals with unlimited studio time by comparison. Even the design of the Sheer Mag logo on this go-round has slightly morphed. On previous albums, the text was flat and black, in the style of any classic power-pop band of the hair-metal era. On this record, that logo has been given 3D depth and is finished in shiny chrome, with a twinkle glinting off the surface. Same band, same logo, same spirit—polished.
Buy: Rough Trade
