Its Bucket Day in America! Frankly, its Bucket day around the entire world...
The Western Mass stalwarts are back with their second EP this year (after July's excellent Beyond the Pail) and boy does this one rock. The quartet is in as fine a form as ever. Across these four tracks, Bucket rediscover the magic after a nine-year hiatus and the results are a rollicking good time. The barn-burner "Untouchable" leads off this splendid affair, and no quarter is given across the other three tracks. Bucket is just so damn good. We are in love with Bucket. BUCKET FOREVER!!!!
"While the EP’s only truly doctrinal country-rock moment is the timeless “Rare Bird,” the ghosts of Gram Parsons and Gene Clark haunt the sound throughout, most explicitly in the yearning pedal steel of guest artist Connor “Catfish” Gallaher, a frequent collaborator of Bucket bassist Eli Salus-Kleiner. The question is whether Meyer, an involuntarily incisive cultural critic and humorist, can play by those classicist rules. The answer is yes, absolutely, and of course not.
Meyer builds a lyrical world here as comfortable with the antique, the hurt, and the heartfelt (“I know the heart is a rare bird searching”) as with the painfully current (“In this economy, we all keep lurking for love/that we can charge on a credit card, when we only have one bar.”) In one of the record’s keynote lines (in the song “Victors”) Meyer finds a contemporary tragic hero and villain in the same family, referencing the late Silver Jews frontman David Berman and his estranged arch-capitalist, lobbyist father in a moment that inverts all definitions of losers and winners.
Buy Now, Pay Later emerges as a coming of age story from a quartet of college mates in the Pioneer Valley, each of whom might have pursued any number of professional paths but who, at every turn, kept that space open for music. In the Pay Later part of that phase, they find themselves approaching middle age in the sickening milieu of influencer culture, sleaze capitalism, the dubious veracity of everything, and the rising tide of American-branded fascism. Buy Now, Pay Later roots its sadness, its panic, and its hope in the act of playing good old fashioned rock music with some highly skilled friends.
