On a soggy Thursday evening, my partner-in-crime and I made our way into Ballard’s Tractor Tavern for the perfect cure for our mildew blues: Julia Massey and the Five Finger Discounts, The Hoot Hoots, and the Great Um.
Five Letters From Far Away, the new album from Julia Massey and the Five Finger Discount, is a cosmic pop journey, space exploration through a dance-party sector of the universe.
It’s this honesty that shines through the entire album. Liz Rognes is a woman who is not afraid of her own self, her strengths and her flaws, and she sings her truth in a voice of redemption …
The album crosses realms of a less audacious Modest Mouse, a Decemberist without the pretension, or an Aqueduct beyond synth; the production, a crisp sheen on a bulging, morphous creature of pop-rock.
Gone is the overcast, coffee simmered survival mechanistic humor; this is a sound not of salty skyscrapers but of a land left wilder, the sound of a handful of speeding cars on I-84 at midnight.
..the EP is an aural glimpse of a ghost, an Americana wanderer searching for a frontier that disappeared in the gaudy neon of the modern world.
The snow had stopped by the time we reached the High Dive, Fremont only getting a heavy dust on this first day of Puget Sound’s state-of-emergency, national-news-making, self-parodying blizzard.