Sometimes it takes discerning ears to pinpoint what
accounts for the greatness of a rather traditional band and separates them from
the ultramodern slush pile that makes up the typical listening experience in
this streaming age. Click, listen, copy into playlist, then move on to the next
few minutes of music discovery and/or following hype-assisted crowds.
To me, Fort Frances’ Alio is a sort of record that breathes and exists somewhat outside
of the sphere of the horizon-less Spotify shuffle. These are, pound for pound,
the Chicago-based trio’s catchiest songs to date. That probably doesn’t mean
much to those uninitiated with the band, but they’ve taken the yearning,
red-blooded core of Atlas, Harbour, and Breathing Room - good songs worth revisiting over time - and they
have created a bona fide rock album that not only ceases to forfeit the roots
of where they come from but ramps up the urgency, musicianship and sense of adventurousness
across the board. The production of Sam Kassirer (previous Fort Frances
outings, as well as Josh Ritter and Langhorne Slim) impresses throughout the
album, coaxing muscular arrangements and crispness while steering clear of
commercial grandstanding. Fort Frances and Kassirer have a perceptive
understanding of what best suits a song, and the songs of Alio are outstanding.
Writing about the album is a pleasure for me, because
I’ve been fortunate enough to have been living with many of these songs for
more than a year. “Days Get Heavy,” “These Are the Mountains Moving,” “Best of
Luck,” “Anonymous,” and “This Year Is Yours” all compromised the band’s 2015
EP, No One Needs to Know Our Name, a
collection of songs that was in as frequent of a rotation as anything else I
listened to over the past year. I begrudgingly held off writing much about that
EP because I (*full disclosure) contributed to Fort Frances’ bio ahead of that
release. Come year end, I regretted not finding the proper outlet for
attempting to share my two cents for how much I loved No One Needs to Know Our Name.
Cue the glory of second chances. When frontman and
songwriter David McMillin sent Alio
my way earlier this year, I was thrilled to discover the record consists of all
of those songs and a handful of new ones that retain all of their spirit and
depth, each one worthy of being a standalone single and each one intertwined in
the fabric of the album as a whole. McMillin, Aaron Kiser and Jeff Piper have
been working on bringing this album into the world for a few years now, and I
can only imagine how tough it has been going day to day for all that time
sitting on songs this great, just waiting on the opportunity for others to hear
them.
Vonnegut would say “so it goes.” And so it does.
Such is the reality of the striving artist now more
than perhaps ever before, especially for musicians in this age of the streaming
content blitzkrieg.
It shouldn’t be all that surprising that this was the
perspective Fort Frances came from when writing and composing Alio. It is scrawled right there in the
modest manifesto of No One Needs to Know Our Name. It’s evoked in the nostalgic
Polaroid Alio cover art: a boy in sunglasses, blue sweats and cowboy boots, a nondescript patrol car,
a suburban driveway, all the not-yet-vanquished dreams and all the weight of
the adult world just out of frame, all the ways our senses and sense of self
are spinning in the opaque cyclone of the Cloud. Much of that may not be overt
on first listen to any of these songs, but it’s almost impossible to miss in
McMillin’s songwriting, his callbacks to lyrics from other songs, his
expeditions into the caverns of his being while the modern world keeps on
spinning on a digital axis that gets easier and easier to get lost in but
harder to define in terms of what makes each of us a human, a lover, an artist,
or a salvageable individual.
“You
will be born anew before these mountains move
There’s
a record spinning in the distance over and over and over and over again…
Can
you feel the army in your bones?
It
sings of love and sex and loneliness and faith and truth and absolutes” –
“This Year Is Yours”
The coup that Fort Frances pulls on Alio is an achievement that many bands
strive for but usually come up short. The trio build upon an already solid
foundation of melodic songwriting, channel an earned chemistry from years
playing alongside in intimate clubs and tap into that shared language in the
studio, and patiently plunder the catalog and hone the sound of ten cohesive
songs that soar beyond perhaps even conservative expectations. Compared to the
more folk-minded compositions of Atlas
and Harbour, Alio is a huge sounding rock record with a steady barrage of
indelible, rousing pop hooks. The drums hammer staccato march formations (“You
Got the Wrong Man”) and accelerate to climactic bombast (“Building a Wall”), they
crib Moon and Antarctica-esque angles
and coolness (“Sigh of Relief”), jubilant horns propel the introspective mission
statement of “Anonymous,” a cathartic shout-along chorus anchors the
unpredictability of “Days Get Heavy,” and steady streams of crescendos and
harmonious, elegantly-layered bridges keep the songs unapologetically alive. At
the beating heart of it all is McMillin’s world-weary yet idealistic outlook,
an irreplaceable asset that allows all of his mediations on traveling, loves
lost, mountains moving, and unframed memories to come through the speakers with
equal parts rugged beauty and vulnerability while keeping the narrative moving
towards each chorus in winsome and wistful rock songs.
Throughout Alio,
Fort Frances construct songs with a classicist pop-rock
verse-chorus-verse-chorus that, on paper or first listen, may make it tough to
decipher what makes this trio special. But, when taken as a whole and given the
chance to be absorbed into the surroundings of one’s day, it can become
something more of a concentrated challenge not to take for granted just how
great and special these songs are. That, after all, is what strikes me as the
overriding goal Fort Frances has set out to bring to life: to make songs that
have the potential to galvanize and be popular, but also say something – make
empathetic observations about some not necessarily young (but not necessarily
old) way of American life, and make it sound not terribly out of place with
some of the good stuff that has stood the test of time on rock radio, while
also not being fashionably in place alongside the majority of music being
streamed into the millions. The goal is simply to have a relationship with and,
perhaps, fall in love with the songs and promise not take them for granted
should they hit you in the sweet spot.
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