They are a proper rock band, with sharp riffs, adequate guitar solos, and harmonies so close they indeed betray old friendships and biological bonds. But every member of Mildred is a songwriter, and the focus of Fenceline is decidedly its words, so much so that every syllable falls squarely beneath Temple\u2019s spotlight. They write with a novelist\u2019s eye for descriptive detail\u2014the sound an empty streetside garbage bin makes, the one sailor among a rowdy dozen holding a shiny popsicle, the morning moon in an old photo.<\/p>\n
These minutiae are the bones and joints shaping the skeleton, leaving plenty of room for the listener to build the body of the story for themselves. There is, for instance, the incredible opener \u201cUPS Brown,\u201d where Koehler descends through the clouds to a rainy city\u2019s airport, only to find the ride he was expecting had other plans and that said plans include him only vaguely. I remember being 20 and flying to New York to visit my first real girlfriend, then being childishly stunned to realize she had, of course, other friends in her new home. There is the pensive title track, where Koehler toggles between self-indulgence and service to someone he loves. He daydreams about stopping whatever he\u2019s doing to adopt a highway and planting that person\u2019s favorite flowers beneath the roadside sign that bears his name, a perennial postcard of his good deed from a parcel he can control in our uncontrollable world. I remember the time, only a few weeks ago now, of putting aside work and play to clean baseboards and mop, so that my wife could return to a clean home after a successful but also tragic<\/a> climb up North America\u2019s tallest mountain. It felt like something I could manage, like that little strip of road median Koehler wants to paint blue.<\/p>\n And then there is the redoubtable \u201cFleet Week,\u201d the most vivid and verbose song on Fenceline. His voice a warm but wry baritone, Schrott tangles American, Greek, and self-mythology during a visit to a World War II submarine<\/a>. He considers the way simple pleasures\u2014this poblano spread, that aforementioned popsicle\u2014matter more than our most grand designs, from jingoism to highfalutin life aspirations. He thinks about all he doesn\u2019t know, then offers up a summary of what he does: \u201cI can make do with these three small rules: Keep it quiet, tight, and clean.\u201d I don\u2019t know that another line has ever made me simultaneously consider Davids Berman<\/a> and Allan Coe, particularly the ways their weird wisdom could sparkle inside a song. I hear \u201cFleet Week\u201d and think about the country\u2019s semiquincentennial, about the small joy of chuckling at presidential plans ruined by armies of algae. You can stick your own memories to these melodies.<\/p>\n Mildred made Fenceline without much pressure, with a modicum of buzz so small it registers here only as room tone. Fenceline sounds natural and warm, unbothered by the need to say or do too much aside from share stories and a few philosophical musings. \u201cI like that it\u2019s not cool or edgy or flashy,\u201d Fortna said<\/a> of the band\u2019s name and, by extension, their sound, \u201cbecause we\u2019re none of those things.\u201d When I read that, I think about \u201cPitch Boats,\u201d the stunning little song near the end of Fenceline. Koehler, Schrott, and Palmquist harmonize to moments from childhood when the smallest indiscretions could feel like a whole wonderful world of adventure, like setting pinecones on fire and adrift in a little ditch or trapping gophers on tennis courts. \u201cDistant relatives in oil paint\/And I\u2019m a ghost of some little kid sneaking sodas from the shed,\u201d Koehler sings near the end, doing his best Red House Painters<\/a>. Keeping a skosh of that youthful naivete led Mildred to one of the year\u2019s most endearing and disarming indie rock records. I hope they can keep it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"They are a proper rock band, with sharp riffs, adequate guitar solos, and harmonies so close they indeed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":505740,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[4958,156,157,111,139,69,1251],"class_list":["post-505739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-albums","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=505739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/505739\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/505740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=505739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=505739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=505739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}