Greg Freeman releases ‘Losers Prize’
Greg Freeman | Photo credit: Gabe Long
“Poetic, off-kilter, devastatingly observant… All Set the Bone is at once a fulfilment of the previous album’s promise and a thrilling step up, harnessing Freeman’s righteous anger into songs that better capture the raucous energy of his live show. Freeman updates the sound of the ’90s rock underground to reflect the absurdities and indignities of modern life.”
-The New York Times
“Greg Freeman may have called his last album Burnover, but the John Congleton-produced All Set the Bone is the sound of the Vermont singer aflame.”
-Pitchfork
“Another lyrical, fuzzy masterpiece is on the way."
-Stereogum
"A call-to-arms that eschews subliminal messaging and instead opts for desperate directness… Freeman and co. have never sounded so urgent."
-Paste
Greg Freeman shares ‘Loser’s Prize,’ the final single from his forthcoming album, All Set the Bone, which has been named one of the most anticipated albums of the fall by the New York Times and Pitchfork. The track arrives with a mixed media animated video directed by Wyatt Carson.
On ‘Loser’s Prize,’ Freeman writes about the fears of love “nursed by catastrophe, yet protected by the limits of its own memory.” Just as he did on, I Looked Out and Burnover, he dives well and far here into what it costs to live through the present moment, and his band’s instrumentation mirrors that with dense song structures and spacious improvisation.
Freeman calls All Set The Bone a “reflection of a lot of change, and a lot of tension.” It’s a box of political and personal yarns spread across four sides, “inhuman events” and grief pulled into a “perfect tsunami.” While writing and recording it, Freeman moved out of his longtime home in Burlington, holed up in a middle-of-nowhere part of the Southwest, and stepped into music full-time, leaving behind odd jobs as a cemetery landscaper and restaurant line cook. The following album is populated by a grain of similarly unsettled people: a voter buried in credit card debt, a pair of Christian hearts clanking like trapped lobsters, a town of bent necks, a lover with limbs bent like crab apple trees.
All Set The Bone features Freeman’s longtime collaborators Garrett Linck and Sam Atallah, and new ones including Florry’s Joey Sullivan, The Rockin Worms’ Carney Hemler, Anna McClellan and Trinity Ace. The album is produced by John Congleton.
Watch the ‘Loser’s Prize’ video
Tour dates (UK dates in bold):
20/10 - The Sinclair - Cambridge, MA, US
22/10 - The Mod Club - Toronto, ON, Canada
23/10 - Mahall's - Lakewood, OH, US
24/10 - Lincoln Hall - Chicago, IL, US
25/10 - High Noon Saloon - Madison, WI, US
27/10 - Amsterdam Bar & Hall - St. Paul, MN, US
28/10 - Reverb Lounge - Omaha, NE, US
30/10 - Marquis - Denver, CO, US
31/10 - Kilby Court - Salt Lake City, UT, US
02/11 - Tractor Tavern - Seattle, WA, US
03/11 - Aladdin Theater - Portland, OR, US
05/11 - The Independent - San Francisco, CA, US
06/11 - Sid The Cat Auditorium - South Pasadena, CA, US
07/11 - Voodoo Room at House of Blues San Diego - San Diego, CA, US
10/11 - Antone's Nightclub - Austin, TX, US
11/11 - Club Dada - Dallas, TX, US
13/11 - The Masquerade - Purgatory Stage - Atlanta, GA, US
14/11 - Eulogy - Asheville, NC, US
15/11 - Motorco Music Hall - Durham, NC, US
16/11 - The Atlantis - Washington, DC, US
18/11 - First Unitarian Church - Philadelphia, PA, US
20/11 - Webster Hall - New York, NY, US
21/11 - Higher Ground Ballroom - South Burlington, VT, US
08/02 - Hare and Hounds - Birmingham, UK
09/02 - Brudenell Social Club - Leeds, UK
11/02 - The Deaf Institute - Manchester, UK
13/02 - Mono - Glasgow, UK
16/02 - Scala - London, UK
17/02 - Thekla - Bristol, UK
18/02 - Green Door Store - Brighton, UK
* w/ Hello Shark
` w/ Walker Rider
$ w/ Trinity Ace
# w/ Touch Girl Apple Blossom
^ w/ Robber Robber
Watch the previously released ‘Indu’ & ‘Cahokia’ videos
More about All Set The Bone:
Traces of pre-Good News Modest Mouse and early Pavement linger, but All Set The Bone resists easy lineage through a deliberate fracture that’s twisting yet familiar. Freeman’s longtime obsessions with Fugazi and Unwound colour the album’s heavier dirges and its spangled outposts grew from a diet of Big Star, The Drones, and Mission of Burma. Lyrically, Freeman’s pen is too strong for analogy, as he riffs on bodies turned to ground beef, or chasing a dream but settling for a niche.
After Burnover’s queasy fixation on ghost stories and various New York locales and histories, Freeman again returns to the immediacy and anxiety of time and history, building a choir of questions out of constellations where “the light pours in just like hourglass sand.” Opener ‘Cahokia’ is titled after the ancient Indigenous mounds that sit on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, whose builders disappeared. Freeman uses taxidermy and amber-casted bugs to contextualize songs about love and grief. Near the end of side one, he even makes this striking declaration: “No culture, and no more rock and roll.” But “Decade” may sum All Set The Bone up best: “History rubbernecks at each of your darkening thoughts.” Freeman says there’s a “sense of time running out, of us becoming stuck in the trajectory of our own history.” It’s a theme that he’s been unpacking since I Looked Out, but he’s never done it better than right here in these seventy minutes.
On All Set The Bone, he embraces friction instead of refusing it, using scant rehearsal times and urgent, self-appointed deadlines to fill his third album with ambitious whims: smile-stretching guitar scorchers, cosmic percussive surges, near-baroque piano riffs, psych-rock noodles, brass cutouts, and enough key changes to build an unsolvable musical maze. All Set The Bone was finished quickly, in a real Hollywood studio with one of rock’s best modern architects, and with minimal separation between idea and outcome. For Freeman, uncertainty has become his wealthiest currency. “It should never feel comfortable,” he says. “Every album should scare you.”
Track List:
1. Cahokia
2. Totaled
3. Culture
4. Withdrawn
5. Indu
6. Loser’s Prize
7. Hail Mary
8. Decade
9. Marooned
10. Untitled 10
11. Next To Nothing
12. Costs
13. Bury Me The Shovel
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