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By Dennis Cook
What makes Marah so downright interesting is how they elude simple definitions. Careening between sloppy great basement rockin’ and tender-beyond-belief slow numbers, their fourth album announces a band ready for bigger things.
At just a hair over 40 minutes, If You Didn’t Laugh, You’d Cry doesn’t waste a second. The first two cuts explode with all the primal stuff that makes boys start bands in the first place – brash and sassy and too much fun for their own good. So we’re caught off guard when “City of Dreams” floats in, a barroom piano slow-dancing with a fluty shadow, acoustic guitars flowing elegantly into a wistful cloud. Both this track and “So What If We’re Outta Tune (with the Rest of the World)” could have graced the Garden State soundtrack, rubbing shoulders with Iron & Wine. They capture the sprightly yet deeply bummed feel of Elliott Smith's “Rose Parade” or “I Don’t Think I’m Ever Gonna Figure It Out.”
Without apology, they turn on a dime and follow these tender sojourns with gutsy, foot-stompin’ gravy like “Fat Boy” and “The Demon of White Sadness,” which put them one town over from the Drive-By Truckers or the Gourds. Everything on these songs seems tipsy, off-center in a freewheeling way. It’s delightful and part of what may have you coming back to this one more often than you’d expect. Like the Truckers, the songs have depth, even when they seem loose as shit.
Any attempts to resist “Sooner or Later” will just give you a nasty cramp. Give in, maybe take a hambone solo or just suck down some ‘shine, and listen to an amazing evocation of Muswell Hillbillies-era Kinks, with superlative lines like “Pretty eyes we can tell no lies kick start our traveled hearts in the evening hours.” Damn.
In ways, Marah resembles the artists to which they’re most frequently compared (Bruce Springsteen and The Replacements) but only in their unwavering faith in the innate power of rock – apostles with shitty day jobs, patriots with engine grease under their nails. I’ll throw in the Old 97's (if they were more sincere) or ‘70s Cheap Trick as additional touchstones. These precedents just speak to the intrinsic rightness of what Marah does. They stand next to these bands instead of kneeling before them.
High-spirited, packed with imaginative textures, direct, a little world-weary but also worldly-wise, Marah’s latest is one of the most instantly likeable albums this year. That it also welcomes deeper scrutiny and still leaves you grinnin’ bodes well for the future.
JamBase | San Francisco
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