There’s a world full of fear and a world full of love,” Bruce Springsteen once told the British rock journalist David Hepworth. “And they’re both the same world.”
When you boil it down, doesn’t music really, come down to that?
Mike Williams probably knows. He’s an interesting character. He’s the man behind R.R. Williams (named after his father), but he’s been part of the Tulsa music scene for much longer. The press release that came with this refers to both a punk and metalcore past. It never names the metalcore band, but I’d be prepared to bet it was The Agony Scene. Signed to a Christian metal label, they were a fairly big deal.
It’s said that while playing bass with John After The Agony Scene broke up, Williams moved his music to a more acoustic version, if you will.
This brings us to “Unremarkable Lives”, their debut, named after Williams and his wife losing their jobs. The everyman existence in small towns, trying to make ends meet, is sandblasted through this.
“Tightrope” has a sort of Springsteen feel. That rock n’ roll everyman. “I can’t shake the feeling of something to believe in”.
These nine songs, it could be argued, are searching for exactly that.
Constantly seemingly looking back, “Photographs” is a beautiful, stark thing. “Teenage angst never reconciled,” he offers. “We never stood for something we “could define.” And there’s a void in these songs like there is in all of us.
Some of this is worthy of Jason Isbell—and praise gets no higher. The fragile “The Chase,” an unconventional love song, just Williams and a guitar, is special, as is “Tulsa,” that sense of place, but a place you don’t want to be, even though it’s home.
And that world? It’s changing so much that you get left behind. That’s “Storefronts,” when that home is home no more.
“Last In Line” has a tinge of one of those songs on a Drive-By Truckers record that Mike Cooley sings, but what is striking about these is just how powerful and raw the acoustic ones are. That power isn’t bombast or abrasion, but they lay themselves truly bare, particularly “Your Ghosts” is brilliant as it questions religion and faith, or the way it discusses depression on “Slowly Sinking”.
The title track plays us out on a kind of silver lining. “We made the most of unremarkable lives,” it repeats again and again as if reminding itself, but all of life is here.
Those two worlds Springsteen spoke about are the two worlds of “Unremarkable Lives”. Indeed, maybe all our lives are. That’s what makes this so good: so honest, so reflective, and yes—so remarkable.
Rating: 9/10
REVIEW: R.R WILLIAMS – UNREMARKABLE LIVES (2024)
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