Spins: Ratboys • Singin’ to an Empty Chair
Ratboys
Singin’ to an Empty Chair
(New West)
Chicago-based indie-rock veterans Ratboys are back with their sixth full-length album and first for New West. Singer and guitarist Julia Steiner has revealed that creating Singin’ to an Empty Chair was a way to work through the difficult experience of estrangement from a family member while seeking a means to reconnect.
The album title reflects the therapeutic exercise of voicing difficult subjects aloud to an absent partner. “What’s it gonna take to open up,” Steiner asks her phantom partner in bright and conversational soprano on “Open Up.” The sound of Empty Chair reveals an affinity for a broad range of styles from snarling indie rock to tumbling folk and swooning Americana. “Know You Then” has the crunch and soaring emotion of a lost Weezer track. The taut, chugging “Anywhere” paints a codependent portrait of an extremely faithful family dog’s separation anxiety. Steiner’s melancholy plea and extended olive branch in the mid-tempo country-pop of “Just Want You to Know the Truth” are couched in beguiling acoustic chime and jangle, colored by weeping pedal steel. The impact isn’t far removed from the most measured, hypnotic swings on Tom Petty’s Wildflowers. Dave Sagan’s guitar lines bend and twang through the countrified “Penny in the Lake.” “It’s just someone’s wish they forgot,” sings Steiner of her not-so-lucky find. The shimmering “The World, So Madly” comes to terms with a lack of control.
Drummer Marcus Nuccio and bassist Sean Neumann provide deft and powerful propulsion throughout the album, setting the tone for expansive songs like the pocket epic “Light Night Mountains All That,” as Sagan veers toward “Kashmir”-adjacent folk fury and ultimately into an electronic breakdown. Neumann joins Steiner to sing the resolute “Burn It Down.” The song identifies the angry urge to smash-and-grab before reducing the world to ash, but it’s an exorcism meant to fuel constructive collaboration through reflection. Jenny Conlee of the Decemberists plays blissful Hammond B-3 organ on the optimistic closing track “At Peace in the Hundred Acre Woods.” Steiner’s lyric banishes midnight gloom in the welcome light of morning and the company of friends. Producer and former Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Chris Walla returns following 2023’s The Window to helm Singin’ to an Empty Chair. The album’s minimally adorned but potent sound rests in the strength of bona fide live-on-the-floor interaction, and these songs should ignite the Vic Theatre stage on April 18. (ratboysband.com)
– Jeff Elbel
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(Rotator Photo by Miles Kalchik)
