In a lot of ways, it’s fitting that the new Deer Tick album “Emotional Contracts”, their first new LP in six years comes out just a few days before Father’s Day. In the literal sense, the Rhode Island-based indie rock lifers (founded by frontman John McCauley in 2004, with their line-up solidified in 2009) are now husbands and fathers, but beyond that, this new record is all about being older and wiser, about looking back at your past self with the perspective that comes from growing up and settling down.
If you’ve been keeping tabs on the band, you already know that this evolution has been brewing for about a decade. McCauley cleaned up his act and married Vanessa Carlton back in 2013 — swapping a notorious cocaine habit for a tamer, healthier domestic life. That same year, he addressed his struggles with substance abuse on the group’s “Negativity” album. He and Carlton welcomed their daughter, Sidney, in 2015. In other words, the maturity and self-awareness on “Emotional Contracts” are hardly new developments.
And yet, when you think back to, say, 2011 or so — when McCauley was gleefully singing lines like “We’re full-grown men, but we act like kids/We’ll face the music next time we roll in” and doing things like lighting his own pubic hair on fire on stage — it’s hard not to marvel at how far he’s come when you hear a track like the excellent “If I Try to Leave,” an ode to the grounding force his family has become for him. (“If I try to leave, I won’t know where I’m going,” he sings on the song, which calls to mind some Keith Richards-fronted Stones classics like “Happy.” “If I reach up my sleeve, I’ll find my compass broken.”) Ask him how the Deer Tick of 10 or 15 years ago compares to present-day Deer Tick, however, and the first thing he stresses is their improved technical ability.
“I think we’re better musicians and we’re more reliable as a unit and maybe as individuals too,” he says. “We’re in our late 30s, so it’s just starting to get a little harder to wake up in the morning after…I don’t know. I’d say we’re slightly more responsible and much better musicians, but we’re still the same idiots that we were.”
“Yeah, I think the biggest difference is obviously that we have so much more experience under the wheels,” guitarist Ian O’Neil adds. “So I think that has given us an opportunity to write better songs. I think Bob Dylan’s best songs came after he was 30, you know what I mean? I think that kind of experience and just knowing what you’ve done wrong in the past with music or with your career or whatever, it just lends itself to a brighter future. So I think we’re just getting better.”
“Emotional Contracts” is proof of that. It’s the band’s most collaborative record to date, whittled down from 20 potential tracks to a concise, cohesive 10. It was mostly recorded live with producer Dave Fridmann (The Flaming Lips, Sleater-Kinney, Spoon), and it’s the closest the group has come to replicating their incredible, raucous live energy in a studio setting. McCauley admits. “But I think the best way to do it is to just try to all play together and record as much as possible, in as little time as possible. I think we used to overthink things in the studio quite a bit, and it just kind of widened the gap between what our albums were and what our live show was. So I think we’ve definitely narrowed it down quite a bit to where, I mean this record, the bulk of it was really just recorded the four of us in the same room looking at each other, making eye contact and not too different from playing on stage. I think the best way for us is to just not overthink it anymore, and just press record and if it sounds good, then we move on.”
One of the album’s standout tracks, the O’Neil-penned “Forgiving Ties,” which sees the guitarist handling lead vocals while McCauley voices the narrator’s inner monologue (“What are we doing? Who are these people? How did we let them get a word in edgewise?“), is a result of the band having extra time to tweak these tracks.
That collaborative spirit and willingness to help each other see their own potential is just part of the reason that Deer Tick is still rolling after all this time. McCauley and O’Neil have both played in other bands and side projects over the years, but they’ve been working in Deer Tick for the better part of two decades now, and they both insist that nothing compares to the work they’ve done together.
The Fat Angel Sings 