Two Gallants “We Are Undone”

Two Gallants “We Are Undone” 2015. ATO Records. On orange and black marbled vinyl, We Are Undone is Two Gallants’ fifth album. Its punk-blues indie rock style skews lo-fi with a decent amount of crunchy guitars. However, there’s  variety and texture beyond a typical alt-rock style. Melancholy and somewhat sinister bluesy piano is front-and-center on “Invitation to the Funeral” and the low key “My Man Go” is super-mellow and spacey, though a couple of the laid-back tracks veer into shoe-gaze blues (if that’s a thing? and if it is, it’s really not my thing). Some songs would find themselves right at home on some early Black Keys records (the title track “We Are Undone, “Some Trouble”), others nod back to the duo’s early toe-dips into grunge as a teenage metal/grunge cover band (like the loud-quiet-loud “Fools Like Us” or the “Age Nocturne” half of “Murder the Season/The Age Nocturne,” the “Murder” half is the above-mentioned shoe-gaze blues), while some sound like 80′s era jangly power pop/college rock (“Incidental”). Overall it’s a good record and part of it straddles several of the genres that I most listen to though the other part is really not my thing. We Are Undone has been in the should-it-stay-or-should-it-go pile for awhile now, I believe, and my mind isn’t totally made up. It’s one of those situations where if I saw the band live, I’d probably be definitively persuaded one way or the other.