The second album by the Philadelphia outfit Sheer Mag begins with a yowl. Triumphant, guttural and faintly unhinged, it’s the kind that suggests arena-sized excess, permed mullets and peacocking masculinity. That it is delivered by a woman, the band’s commanding and pleasingly rough-around-the-edges vocalist Tina Halladay, is the first clue that this almost comically retro mashup of hard rock and power pop may not be an entirely straightforward historical re-enactment. In fact, it soon becomes apparent that the swaggeringly macho and viscerally gleeful sonic palate is going to be taken well outside its comfort zone, because A Distant Call is an album with a sombre and timely purpose: to parse the way global-scale tragedy intersects with deeply personal pain.
You can trace this intimate take on the horrors of history back to Sheer Mag’s celebrated 2017 debut, Need to Feel Your Love, on which the group noted the continued psychic imprint of 20th-century injustice – from the inhumane treatment of LGBTQ people (told via an impressionistic remembering of the Stonewall riots) to the execution of 21-year-old anti-Nazi activist Sophie Scholl. The latter seemed as much an exercise in ethics as a pop song: amid leisurely soft rock, it saw Halladay sit unflinchingly with the brutality of Scholl’s death, imagining details like the temperature of the blade that killed her, while maintaining a dogged hope that her death was not in vain.
This time round, Sheer Mag are ready to look present-day societal turmoil in the eye, interweaving grand disaster with small-scale sadness. Unfound Manifest mulls over the refugee crisis, before pulling back to reveal its protagonist bedridden by a depressive episode that is partly fuelled by the untold awfulness of the news cycle. Silver Line sees her consider her own unemployment alongside teacher strikes in West Virginia, while The Right Stuff stridently denounces fat-shaming culture with a sardonic request: “If you’re worried about my health / Shut your mouth and keep it to yourself.” Yet towards the album’s end, some hope glimmers: western governments may have spent the last century conspiring to extinguish socialism in all its forms (or so says The Killer), but – according to Chopping Block – a workers’ uprising could still deliver salvation.
This is an album with an earnest, intricately woven and gravely serious narrative. Yet the laboured-over lyrics are offset by tunes that have only one thing on their minds: instant gratification. Whether songs lean more towards grimy proto-metal (Chopping Block) or chiming 1970s soft rock (Silver Line), every one is underpinned by a sense of elation designed to deliver you on to the dancefloor, or into the thick of the moshpit – or at least have you foot-tapping. Halladay’s rich but slightly strained singing voice brings to mind somebody drunkenly performing their favourite song at karaoke, and it can be hard to resist joining in, especially when that sense of enthusiastic abandon extends to everything else: the parping riffs, the drum flourishes, the tongue-in-cheek backing vocals. As with School of Rock, the Richard Linklater film that celebrated bands such as AC/DC, Led Zeppelin and the Who through the eyes of a group of guileless children, the fact that Sheer Mag have removed classic rock from its sometimes grotty context (groupies, drugs, male entitlement) means they are able to produce a sound that is straightforwardly jubilant – the source of a pure, almost elemental joy.
Yet at times, the contrast between the grim realism of the lyrics and the euphoric rock nostalgia can tip over into incongruity. On Need to Feel Your Love, the medium isn’t entirely dissimilar – a lo-fi melange of chugging garage, funk, soul and hard rock – but it feels raw and desperate simply by dint of its lack of polish. Here, there is occasional scuzz, but the resounding impression is of a gleaming, squealing rock machine. Blood from a Stone is about the grind of food stamp-level poverty, yet the track, with its twanging, countrified guitar and soulful strut, scans as pure positivity. On Cold Sword, a particularly gruelling exploration of feelings of ambivalence in the wake of an abusive father’s death, the buoyant cheer of the music is hard to square with the story.
Ultimately, Halladay and co are treading the line every modern artist must if they want to make work that is relevant and instinctively appealing: refusing to shy away from the realities of our political hellscape, but also sugar-coating that righteous indignation with something consolatory and escapist is a dichotomy that is coming to define much of present-day pop culture. A Distant Call may contain some jarring juxtapositions, but on the whole it’s a welcome opportunity for Sheer Mag to prove that serious idealism and infectious fun can – and should – harmoniously coexist.
This week Rachel listened to
Kano ft D Double E & Ghetts: Class of Deja
The inimitable east London MC furiously re-asserts his old-school grime credentials on this brilliantly bassy ode to pirate radio station Deja Vu FM.
• This story was amended on 22 August 2019 to change the word “galling” to “gruelling”.
