In “The Departed” there’s a line about Deer Tick’s home state that just about says it all: “You know something? They just do not stop having the Mafia in Providence.”
For their ninth album, Deer Tick have leaned right into that. “Coin-O-Matic” is named after the vending-machine company that served as the headquarters of Raymond Patriarca, the legendary mobster who ran one of the most ruthless crime families in U.S. history. Yet this is not some cartoonish crime caper. Instead, Deer Tick find the beauty, the sadness and the poetry in the real lives of Providence.
“Dog Years” opens the record with its narrator sitting on a park bench, feeding the birds until “I’m out of bread.” Then we find out why. She has left him. Simple as that. Except, in the hands of Deer Tick, it is anything but simple. There is a fantastic poetry to it, not to mention the sort of loose, bruised, golden-hour feel that Ryan Adams found around “Gold.”
It is a brilliant opener, and “Mary Singletary” backs it up by sounding nothing like it and still being brilliant. This is one of those choruses you cannot shake, but it also carries a uniquely North American ache, as if it has been wandering around the streets long before anyone thought to record it.
Deer Tick have always been something of a chameleon of a band, and “Endless Loop” proves it again. It is a little more melancholic, a little more worn at the edges, and when John McCauley sings, “I know I should stay right here,” you know this thing is steeped in Rhode Island history, but also in something much wider: the pull of home, even when home does not make it easy.
“Sweetest Things” feels like the sort of thing I would have been buying 25 years ago after reading “Uncut” — and I mean that as high praise. It would have sat next to one of those Lambchop records with no problem at all: odd, lovely, sad, warm and quietly magnificent.
Let’s be honest, Springsteen would love “ACI.” It could — maybe should — have been on “Darkness On The Edge Of Town,” but equally, if you look at “Western Stars,” these are the type of characters who were too nondescript even to think about. That is the point. As the chap in the song notes, “another fool will take my place.” In another band’s hands, that line might sound throwaway. Here, it sounds like a life sentence.
There is a unique kind of sadness to the chug of “Everything Born” too. Even if Ian O’Neil’s superb solo elevates it, we all know the lives being sung about here are real. That is the gift of “Coin-O-Matic”: it never overstates anything. It just lets the people in these songs exist, and somehow that makes them matter more.
“Eyelid” has a more strident nature than much of what surrounds it, but it is the little touches that make this album special. The organ on “I Am An Island,” for example, adds depth without ever feeling ornamental. Deer Tick are not throwing things at the wall here. Everything is placed just so.
The storytelling and imagery are perfect on the ’60s-tinged “507 Smith.” “You don’t wanna know what’s in the trunk,” they offer, before somehow making a catchy hook out of “all’s well that ends well, but sometimes it just ends.”
There are plenty of themes here that are universal. “Exit Door,” for example, finds someone going back to their hometown only to find it unrecognisable, while “Candy Cigarettes” begins as a gorgeous acoustic thing, as warm as the coastal summers of Rhode Island, before exploding in its chorus.
That gives real depth to the album’s final stretch. In many ways, “Coin-O-Matic” can be viewed in the same light as those country collections that tell the tale of the small town. The difference is that those records often romanticise the place. Deer Tick do not need to. Their Providence has its own view, its own scars, its own stories to tell.
And it tells them beautifully.
“Coin-O-Matic” is a quite wonderful record — one of the best of the year so far.
RATING: 9/10
