Palehound - Eye On The Bat

There aren’t many contemporary rock records that manage to be fresh without throwing the genre’s core sense of fun out of the window. Yet on ‘Eye On The Bat’, Palehound’s droll songwriting draws all manner of influences into a captivating sonic palette and still never loses its sense of identity. While ‘Independence Day’ has a buoyant energy that channels the country-adjacent slacker rock sound of Kurt Vile or Courtney Barnett, ‘U Want It U Got It’ echoes the lo-fi crash of The Vaselines, and standout track ‘My Evil’ registers as a truly timeless song that evokes the saloon sleaze of 1960s Bob Dylan. On paper, these seem wildly disparate, and yet they all sit within El Kempner’s voice as genuine songs of experience, part of their self-dubbed genre of ‘journal rock’. Perhaps most importantly, ‘Eye On The Bat’ always has a sense of fun bubbling underneath: as sad as the songs can be they were written by people who enjoy playing them, with the resultant performances marking this as a bonafide rock album. In a landscape that often places image over genuine attitude, here is a consistently solid record with its fair share of gems.