I couldn’t tell you why exactly I’ve spent a lot of time getting reacquainted with Middle Brother’s only album lately. Maybe it’s because these recent unseasonably warm days remind me of burning under the Austin sun while watching their excellent SXSW set in 2011. Maybe it just reminds me of 2011 in general: there’s probably no other album I associate with being in my 20s more than this one, based purely on how often I listened to it back then, and when I listen to it 14 years later, I’m instantly transported back to a very specific chapter of my life.
But whatever the reason, it’s been on heavy rotation again for me, and it should be for you, too. The indie-rock supergroup — which consisted of Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes, Deer Tick’s John McCauley and Delta Spirit frontman Matt Vasquez — was a one-off, and as such it doesn’t get as much attention as any of their main projects. But I’ve always found it to be better than the sum of its parts. (That’s not a knock on any of their primary bands — all three of which I was sufficiently obsessed with at the time Middle Brother came out.) They take turns singing lead and catering to each other’s wheelhouses (earnest, Laurel Canyon-inspired ballads from Goldsmith, more raucous uptempo stuff from Vasquez and road-weary revelations from McCauley), but the whole thing manages to sound cohesive, and you get the sense that there’s no mode they wouldn’t be capable of tapping into.
You’d be hard-pressed to find lovelier harmonies than the ones that open the record on “Daydreaming,” which begins with McCauley setting the scene: “Early in the morning, too hungover to go back to sleep/Every sound is amplified, every light so dizzying.” On their self-titled single, they get a little goofy with an assist from Jonny Fritz (who was still performing under the Jonny Corndawg moniker back then), and they even try their hand at covering The Replacements’ “Portland.” In retrospect, it’s absolutely ridiculous that at age 23 I identified with a jaded line like “Mama gave a camera to her little star/All she gets is pictures of hotels and bars” simply because I happened to spend a lot of time bopping around between various music festivals back then, but when you’re that age, everything that happens to you still feels like the most important thing in the world because your prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed yet. But the more time I spend with Middle Brother at age 36, the more I come to realize that there’s still plenty to latch onto; maybe in another decade or so it’ll remind me of my 30s instead.
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