Emotional Contracts＜限定盤/Red/Black Splatter Vinyl＞

Somewhere along the way, Providence, Rhode Islands Deer Tick morphed fully from a shy, emotional singer/songwriter project into a brawny, tempestuous rock & roll machine and never looked back. Though the output has changed a little bit album by album, depending on how the songwriting duties are divvied up or how thick the conceptual context surrounding the album is, the main ingredients have been more or less the same: warm and weary country-rock ballads or rhythmically driving songs with equal parts greasy Southern rock flavor, rootsy songwriting, and dashes of soul. Emotional Contracts offers a no-nonsense reading of this formula, with ten more songs enthusiastically romping through whats by now a well-established sound for the band. Revved-up rockers like "Disgrace" and "Grey Matter" bring together Tom Petty-like lyrical directness with the messy charm of latter-day Replacements, and "A Light Can Go Out in the Heart" translates these influences into a melancholy ballad graced with sorrowful organ and a chorus of yearning backing vocals. "Running from Love" is another slow-tempo, introspective tune, but the bright arrangement of smooth backing vocals, airy piano lines, and an explosively busy ending make it a soulful rave-up. Band founder John McCauley sings lead on many of the songs, but the track listing intersperses tunes sung by guitarist Ian ONeil like the quirky, island-flavored "Forgiving Ties," a song that blurs together power pop, roots rock hooks, and calypso horn parts. The album closes with the spacious, powerful tune "The Real Thing," a moment of patient searching among songs that are largely declarative and slightly rushed in their excitement. Emotional Contracts finds Deer Tick operating at full power and making very few advancements from previous albums, seeing no need to fix what isnt broken with their meat-and-potatoes, blue-collar rock sound. ~ Fred Thomas