Greg Freeman – All Set The Bone Review
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Transgressive Records
Barely a year after Greg Freeman stormed onto the scene with Burnover, the ascendant indie bard of New England is striking while the iron is hot with his ambitious new album All Set The Bone. After the warm reception of Burnover and an energetic, buzzy tour, he set out on a solo journey through the Southwest to write his third album. Freeman spent months walking in the desert, playing guitar, and dealing with an “inhuman” confluence of life events - a combination that quickly bore creative fruit. All Set The Bone teems with the same urgency that defines his first two albums, taking Freeman’s heart-on-sleeve, dynamic Americana to raucous new heights and punishingly bleak lows. Though it feels cut from the same cloth as the rest of his catalog up to this point, Greg is testing the boundaries of the band’s sound as the turbulence of his life is channeled into something shaggier and rawer.
While he carried some of Burnover’s key elements into this new era, such as the plinky piano and emotive horns, the production on All Set The Bone (courtesy of John Congleton) feels much closer to Freeman’s first record I Looked Out. His latest effort shirks the polished tightness of Burnover’s writing and production in favor of a first-idea-best-idea approach that Freeman wields to great effect, churning out excellent songs like the lead single “Indu” in 20 minutes while sick and alone in the desert. Despite the looser approach to genre experiments and sharp changes in energy and song structure, this is a rock record through and through. Each track adds a new flair to the sprawling 67-minute album, but there’s less emphasis on maintaining a sonic throughline as Freeman attempts to capture the chaotic reality of modern life.
If labeling Freeman’s music as “alt-country” already felt reductive, this third record complicates that identity even further with a collection of 13 meaty tracks that span a wide spectrum of rock music. Opener “Cahokia” is a textbook Greg rocker that seamlessly blends the nerve-fried and the euphoric, with a chorus that begs to be sung and lyrical imagery that reflects Freeman’s view of our downtrodden, isolated world. From there, we roll into “Totaled,” which is the rowdiest thrasher of a track that Freeman has ever put to record, capturing the signature noisiness of his live show. The staccato stabs of “Culture” and the spare wailing of “Withdrawn” add to the rawness of the record’s first half and establish a track-to-track dynamism that borders on whiplash.
By the middle of the album, you’ve already heard several different versions of what this band can sound like, and that variety continues on the centerpiece and crown jewel of the album, “Loser’s Prize.” It’s a song that contains all Greg’s multitudes, as it almost breezily flips between the hooky anthem, the western-ish jam, and the noise rock blowout. More than any other track, it captures the band’s rowdy live energy and emphasizes the breadth of its arrangement with well-placed sprinkles of keys, strings, and backup vocals. Despite its presentation as a solo project, All Set The Bone is anything but. Almost a dozen players are credited on the album, ranging from the expected drums, bass, and guitar to keys, sax, trombone, trumpet, accordion, and violin. “Next to Nothing” is another testament to the band’s versatility, as they oscillate between a piano rock groove sesh and a noisy, freak folk instrumental. The lyrics are equally mercurial, rolling from a classic emo declaration, “I don’t wanna be here right now,” directly into a growling punk nightmare:
They’ll stick you in the dog food factory
With a mouth full of teeth like piano keys
Working for a man you will never ever see
It’s a thrilling twister of a song that sets up the album's phenomenal final stretch, with a bit of Neil Young worship in “Costs” and the crooning banjo ballad “Bury Me The Shovel” making what might be my favorite 3-track sequence of the album.
I’m still struggling to quite put my finger on what All Set The Bone actually is, and that isn’t a bad thing. While I hear bits of the 90s in the production style (Pavement, Pixies, Time Out of Mind Dylan), there are singular qualities that make Freeman’s music stand out - the barroom band vibe, his signature high vocal register, and clever lyricism that is at once earnest and wry. Even if all 13 tracks don’t converge on a particular sound or theme, Greg is refining a sonic identity that is increasing in scope by continuing to delight and devastate in new ways. All Set the Bone is the sound of him and the band experimenting a bit, working out a few exciting new ideas without too much concern for perfection. This sort of looseness, paired with this level of quality, seems to reflect a promising state of creative freedom for the project. I’m still struggling to quite put my finger on what All Set The Bone actually is, and that isn’t a bad thing. While I hear bits of the 90s in the production style (Pavement, Pixies, Time Out of Mind Dylan), there are singular qualities that make Freeman’s music stand out - the barroom band vibe, his signature high vocal register, and clever lyricism that is at once earnest and wry. Even if all 13 tracks don’t converge on a particular sound or theme, Greg is refining a sonic identity that is increasing in scope by continuing to delight and devastate in new ways. All Set the Bone is the sound of him and the band experimenting a bit, working out a few exciting new ideas without too much concern for perfection. This sort of looseness, paired with this level of quality, seems to reflect a promising state of creative freedom for the project. After spending some quality time with the album, that liberty to experiment starts to feel like an antidote, a coping mechanism, and, undeniably, a relief from the hectic reality it reflects.
Parker White lives and works in Boulder, CO where he moonlights as a music writer. When not attending local shows or digging for new tunes, he’s hosting movie nights, hitting the trail, or hanging out with his beloved cat, Reba McEntire. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram @parkerdoubleyoo, and you can read other stuff he’s written over on his Substack.
