The Bollard Bulletin for March 10, 2025

Local Music Monday: Modern Friendship vs. modern love

Mar 10, 2025

Local Music Monday

The humor novelist and culture critic Jason Pargin showed up in my TikTok feed a few weeks ago with some hard-won words of wisdom. “Here’s something they don’t teach you when you’re a kid: You’re gonna have to start your life over at some point,” he began. “Every single adult I know has had to do this at least once with their career or their marriage or their social circle or everything. … Everything you have in life, including the bad stuff, is just a sandcastle, and in the background is always the tide.”

How true. And given this, how lucky we are to have a band like Modern Friendship to express the heartache and anger these tectonic life changes cause, assure us it’s not just us, and demonstrate through their stirring music that we can and will overcome it.

Truth in the Garden, the foursome’s first full-length, is a breakup album par excellence. In a brief write-up earlier this year, I likened the group to Silver Jews, David Berman’s literate indie-rock collaboration with Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich from Pavement. Upon further reflection, an even truer touchstone for Truth is Vic Chesnutt’s The Salesman and Bernadette, the 1998 album he made with Lambchop. Like that booze-damaged masterpiece, Truth is a tragic musical romance combining Carveresque lyrics with next-level musicianship and arrangements.

The first track and single, “Monkey,” struts in with a swingin’, vaguely jazzy groove that, to its great credit, is in no hurry to reach the kick-ass hook embedded in its chorus. Singer Anthony Branca’s got Berman’s flat, everyman tone and innate gift for sly articulation: “Losin’ it / Drinkin’ from the bottle / Committed to the bit / Ripped the lid off the toilet / Oh shit / Another hole that I can’t fix.” Toss in the loud and fuzzy guitar break and outro and you’ve got indie-rock gold.

But this band is packed with platinum talent. Drummer Alex Ouellette is also composing songs with multi-instrumentalists Nick Thompson-Brown (a former conspirator in the genius punk-jazz outfit Lunch Cult) and Jimmy Dority, who shows up, locust-like, every seven years or so backing another exceptionally smart songwriter (see composer Dan Sonenberg’s Lovers of Fiction and Kyle Morgan’s Starcrossed Losers).

The title track follows, a resigned ballad establishing the theme of post-relationship recovery. “Keys on the Table” continues the story, but in the unexpected context of an old-time Appalachian folk stomper. “Or Not,” another Ouellette/Dority composition, mines more Americana (brassy Vaudeville, in this case) as it wrings out more bitter tears before flying into a noisy, chaotic fit reminiscent of a Neutral Milk Hotel meltdown. It’s stunningly good shit, and we’re only halfway through.

“Got a little mad at the Internet/ Met the neighbors outside / Got licked by the dog / We were never sad / We were never sad / We were never sad,” Branca laconically sings on the devastating “We Can’t,” which perfectly captures the frustration of a failing relationship in the refrain: “We can’t make your mind up.” “Cross the Line” extends the plot against an alt-country backdrop, and then we reach “Outro,” a beautiful Ouellette/Dority number that whips itself into a swirling psychedelic froth while Branca drops titles of previous songs — “‘Keys on the Table’ is a bad thing now…” — and the music roars and soars away from the whole glum affair, afterburners glowing.

Where to from here? Nowhere to go but up, of course, but first some satisfying score-settling. The album’s penultimate track, “Anything Good,” is a rumbling, spite-spitting slice of punk country that shakes the preceding rage off its chest, leading us to “Change Shape,” the upbeat pop-country closer.

Modern Friendship is doing a monthly residency at Hi-Fidelity, the brewery in East Bayside (200 Anderson St., Portland) that’s become one of the city’s go-to venues for interesting indie acts of all kinds. They’ll be there this Friday at 8 p.m. and it’s basically free (tips highly encouraged). Come watch another sandcastle crumble in the rising tide, then grab your plastic shovel and a bucket and your little sister and start building a new one.