Garcia Peoples – Dodging Dues (LP Vinyl) Vinyl Record

Review

The sheer power of Garcia Peoples is stunning to behold onstage and on bootlegs, especially when the sextet locks into a heavy groove that never lets up. But that power hasn’t always fully come through on the New Jersey band’s otherwise excellent studio albums. “False Company,” the opening track of the band’s fifth album, Dodging Dues, hits like a gut punch—a three-guitar assault that foreshadows the way the record favors a heavier, tighter indie-rock sound over jammy excursions. Produced by veteran guitarist Matt Sweeney (who rips a solo of his own on “Stray Cats”), Dodging Dues is an exercise in brevity with seven songs that zip by in 34 minutes. Considering Garcia Peoples once put out an album built around a 32-minute song (2019’s One Step Behind), Dodging Dues feels restrained, in a good way. Dodging Dues is the first Garcia Peoples album to feature lead vocals from five of the band’s six members: Keyboardist Pat “P.G. Six” Gubler (Wet Tuna) and bassist Andy Cush both sing for the first time, adding new dynamics to the Garcia Peoples sound. Cush aggressively snarls his way through “Stray Cats” and album-closing fist-pumper “Fill Your Cup” (trading lines with guitarist Danny Arakaki). Guitarist Derek Spaldo, often the de facto lead singer, only has one vocal here, but he makes it count with the mesmerizing love song “Cassandra.” Despite the myriad voices, there’s a cohesiveness that connects these songs (“Cold Dice”> “Tough Freaks”> “Stray Cats” is a suite). “Here We Are” finds Garcia Peoples at their most Yo La Tengo-esque: patient and meditative while building to a hypnotic crescendo driven by guest Dan Iead’s pedal steel guitar. Lead guitarist Tom Malach takes a rare vocal turn on choogle-y anthem “Tough Freaks,” which features a chorus that might as well sum up the LP’s ethos: “Tough freaks/ On those rough streets/ It’s impossible to cage us/ Don’t you try, it won’t phase us.”

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— Rudi Greenberg, jambands.com

Product Details

Dodging Dues is a startlingly expansive record—“startling” in part because it’s relatively short (seven songs, all but one hovering around the four minute mark), but also because it traverses so many moods and styles: languid and dreamy one moment, surging and intense the next. Garcia Peoples (these days a six-person band) “hit their stride” a long time ago, but here they seem to be hitting a different one, working themselves loose of influences (though this tree has roots: traces of Thin Lizzy, of more arcane bits of U.K. folk-prog, of vintage Meat Puppets in some of the softer passages) while at the same time opening themselves up to their own individual strangeness, becoming ever more singular and ever more free.