Just to get the throngs of Riverdale fans up to speed: Tough Age are the kind of cool AV club kids who don’t tend to exist in the TV Archie universe. To cross Netflix references, they’re closer to the Stranger Things kids (nice + smart = cool). You could imagine the Riverdale Gang investigating the sudden disappearance of Jesse Locke (drums), Penny Clark (bass/vox) and Jarrett Samson (guitar/vox), only to find out that they simply moved to a big city with comic book shops and record stores and totally pleasant day jobs they legitimately enjoy.
Shame is the cleanest sounding Tough Age record thus far, in at least two senses. For starters, the Toronto-via-Vancouver trio sound more like New Zealand guitar pop legends the Clean than ever before. If you’re wondering whether they suffer from anxiety of influence about this, well, there’s a track called Unclean that perfectly evokes the former band’s wiry guitar melodies and beeline drumming.
The album also has a tidy and meticulous sonic palette, courtesy of fellow Flying Nun enthusiast Peter Woodford and his precision work at Bottle Garden Studios in Montreal. Everything sounds unadorned but well-defined, a kind of sonic white-light treatment that teems with presence. The songs have an artful transparency, relying solely on the strength of their structure and the band’s performances.
It’s refreshingly confident for a minimalist outfit to take such a bare-bones approach to production, but it’s still risky, even for a band as melodically gifted and technically proficient as Tough Age. The best moments are when they stretch out a riff for a while, like on Everyday Life or Unclean (or the wonderful anti-riff swamp-monster titular track that closes out the record). On these tracks, you can really appreciate the space Woodford has sculpted around them, ringing with tone, buzzing with velocity.
Other great moments include the one-two punch of Reflected, probably the grooviest pocket on the album, followed by Me In Glue, with its gnarly chorus overdrive. But it’s hard to pick a standout – the whole record is a collection of sweet hooks, wearing nothing but their underclothes, and it’s all over in what seems like 20 minutes. If only other forms of Shame were this fleeting.
Top track: Reflected
Tough Age play the Baby G on Friday, October 6. See listing.
