SHEER MAG - A Distant Call [TMR Reissue] - LP - Clear Red Vinyl [OCT 27]

LP - Indies Exclusive Limited Edition Clear Red Vinyl. Reissue on Third Man Records (TMR).  

Reissue on Third Man of the 2019 album A Distant Call. They’re still writing about surviving our current hellscape, but this time around, the politics get extra-personal. The album verges on being a concept piece, and the protagonist resembles frontwoman, Tina Halladay herself. The songs document a particularly alienating time in her life when she was laid off from a job. Broke and newly single, her father passed away, leaving her with more wounds than felt possible to heal. It’s heavy power-pop so sleek it gleams. “We’ve been waiting to write these songs since we started the band and we were able to take these experiences and build a story out of them,” Halladay says. A Distant Call makes an argument for socialism on an anecdotal level. We’re talking about how late capitalism alienates and commodifies whatever is in its path without using the term ‘late capitalism.’” Palmer and Halladay’s new approach to lyricism extended to the recording process, too. Once the Seely brothers had laid down the tracks, Halladay recorded vocals with producer Arthur Rizk (Power Trip, Code Orange).

History has shown that the greatest bands–bands with that certain, ever elusive quality called lasting power–neither conform to nor buck the trends of their time, but rather force the times to catch up to them. Sheer Mag has such lasting power in droves. After almost a decade spent carving out a career that has already become the stuff of modern underground legend, the band’s new stand-alone single, “All Lined Up,” comes alongside the announcement of their signing to Third Man Records–their first partnership with a larger independent label–who will also be physically and digitally re-releasing the entirety of Sheer Mag’s back-catalogue, including their cult-beloved early EPs I (2014), II (2015), and III (2016), as well as their first two breakthrough LPs, Need To Feel Your Love (2017) and A Distant Call (2019).

Sheer Mag’s sensibility, as fervently beloved by baseball-tee clad garage rockers and tattoo-less indie kids as it is by leather-and-stud-loyal punks, finds its strength in an unconventional mixture of refined complexity and straight-forward pop prowess. Seamlessly trading between head-turning guitar heroics and a charmingly timeless blend of disco, hard rock, and garage inflected hooks, Sheer Mag’s oft-referenced, never-replicated sound has played an undeniably large role in stoking the current resurgence of interest power-pop forward rock music. While quickly adopted as a fan-favorite amongst the sweat-caked crowds of the early 2010’s underground, time has attested to Sheer Mag’s singular cultural mutability: though never straying too far from their home-town Philadelphian origins.

Tracklist: 

Side A
1. Steels Sharpens Steel [4:02]
2. Blood From A Stone [2:37]
3. Unfound Manifest [3:36]
4. Silver Line [3:25]
5. Hardly To Blame [3:07]

Side B
1. Cold Sword [3:28]
2. Chopping Block [2:32]
3. The Right Stuff [3:14]
4. The Killer [4:43]
5. Keep On Runnin' [3:07]