Frontier Ruckus - Eternity of Dimming (2013) [FLAC]
Released: 2013
Duration: 85:54
Genre: Pop/Rock
Style: Alternative Country, Indie Pop
Codec: FLAC
Bit Rate: ~ 900 kbps
Bits Per Sample: 16
Sample Rate: 44,100 Hz
Cover: Front
Source: WEB
Disc 1
01 Eyelashes
02 Black Holes
03 Thermostat
04 Birthday Girl
05 Junk-Drawer Sorrow
06 The Black-Ice World
07 I Buried You So Deep
08 Granduncles of St. Lawrence County
09 Bike Trail
10 I Met Rebecca
Disc 2
01 Eternity of Dimming
02 If the Sun Collapse
03 Nightmares of Space
04 Surgery
05 If the Summer
06 In Protection of Sylvan Manor
07 Dealerships
08 Funeral Family Flowers
09 Open It Up
10 Careening Catalog Immemorial
Michigan-based folk-country band Frontier Ruckus has a sound that is oddly lush, and yet somehow sparse and elegantly simple, the way a river moves through different landscapes when seen from above, calm and tranquil, but underneath every molecule is in motion. Led by the songs and singing of Matthew Milia, the band's songs are all about a kind of artful, literary nostalgia, remembering places, conversations, important meetings, and partings, all set against the geography of Michigan. Yes, this is a Michigan band, but Milia sings about his home as if it were standing in for the experience of growing and living anywhere, a kind of personal Spoon River Anthology as done by early R.E.M., say, with a sad lilt and a yearning for the ghosts of the past to make sense.
This set, a sprawling 20 songs spread over two discs, is wonderfully unified, with a ghostly, flickering soundscape playing out behind Milia's sad but still reaffirming singing. This isn't rocking dance music (although you'll still tap your feet). It's more like a kind of back-porch twilight session that works because it's telling a story, an intertwined story of growing up in Southeast Michigan, coping with everything that comes with that, that comes with growing up anywhere at all. This is Americana wrought with the vision of a poet, intelligent and lyrical but not unnaturally so. Engineered and produced by Jim Roll at Backseat Productions in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Eternity of Dimming is a beautiful, nostalgic (in the best meaning of the word) hymn to time and place, a long suite of songs that falls together like a wonderful quilt of memories.