Written by: Dave Cantrell

With some artists in the ‘indiesphere’ and its multiple tendrils it’s a challenge to get a full handle on the depth and complexities of their trajectory from their long-ago start to the still active now (think Kramer as a particular for-instance but there are at least a dozen more including, say, Richard Barone, David Callahan we could probably do this all day if we had the time) and not least among those is the guy whose moniker constitutes half the band name we’re talking about here and yes that’s the Glenn Morrow of Glenn Morrow’s Cry For Help that dropped its latest on the – where else? – Bar/None imprint – founded and owned as it was/is by Mr Morrow – on July 17th and to finish this run-on sentence dressed up as an opening paragraph we can but turn to that not-really-real-but-SO-precise word: fantabulous.

Details? Yeah, we’ll get there but first the proverbial thumbnail sketch of a background as implicitly promised above. Formed in the mid-to-late twenty-teens, GMCFH, as much as just about anyone in the 21st century, epitomizes that whole Hoboken/Maxwell’s nexus that some forty (gulp) years ago was the feverish incubator that birthed a scene as critical as any other such locale in “rock’n’roll”‘s storied history (and yes we include Memphis SF LA Detroit and NYC’s legendary seedy enclaves), providing as it did the proverbial springboard for the likes of The Feelies, The Bongos, Yo La Tengo, and dozens more including, as it happens and rather inevitably, the debut album Fields from a young Mr Morrow’s first band the Individuals. So, OK, that rather sprawling nutshell of history more or less covered let’s dive into the gist of the oh-so-wryly titled Our Final Album Vol.1. 

Falling from the off into the poignantly melancholic, “Autumn Leaves” soon, past its initial stanza, hits a certain nerve wherein that perspective afforded those of a, yes, certain age casts as it can’t help but do a, well, autumnal light on just about every life development not least familial, that particular state of grace’s most potent trigger reflected in the refrain “gather ’round, the great grandson” before, with no little agility and surprise, bursting into catharsis before closing out, the thunder behind them, with “the autumn leaves flow through an open door” and consider your correspondent suitably moved which is to say, as only art can do, mission accomplished.

That said, said mission finds its parameter immediately widened by the next up “Beatle Bones,” a bit of a stormer framed in classic pop crunch mode, think the Replacements at their height and add a touch of twang and you’re there. Where, exactly? Why, the swoon of something close to indie perfection, where else? As another ferinstance there’s the bossa novish “Boom Boom,” a love song full of effortless swoon and swing that swims through the decades and curls into your ears with an ease and panache your Jobims and Gilbertos might easily groove to in their eternal slumber.

In any case, by this point, we bet you get it: accomplished popitude without a lick of pretension but instead graced with an easy – if nonetheless still hard-won – flow of musicality that quietly – or not so – stuns.

There’s “That’s That,” think Buddy Holly in a sharp Jersey dive where there ain’t a single punter not losin’ it on the floor, followed by such gems as “In Love With Love,” its slowwwww throb of longing melancholia echoing against the walls of one’s heart like the paean to the pangs of universal longing we’re all familar with and that’s the thing with Mr Morrow and his cohorts here (Rick Sherman lead and vox, Mike Rosenberg bass/vox, Ron Metz all things percussive): they can, with what we believe is called ‘preternatural ease,’ swerve from the boom bop of pure out rock’n’roll to the sad sack depths  where one’s barely able to escape the grips of sorrow, to ye olde slow, contemplative mode that sits between those two poles like a mediator searching for solid ground yet when seen/heard in its entirety the album presents not so much as eleven separate tracks stitched together into an LP but more as a singular piece of work unfurled into a holistic emotional tapestry made out of countless hooks and a no uncertain surge that rises then ebbs then rises again as if to convey that very lifeline (AKA ‘the fabric of life,’ maybe?) rock and roll has woven itself in to and out of since time immemorial (OK, the last seventy years or so but you get the drift). You hear it everywhere here, in “Into Something New”‘s driving classicism that one might rightly call ‘universal as fuck,’ followed – and contrasted – by the understandably lissome “Let’s Stay in Bed;” in “Ophelia (at the Five and Dime)” that builds itself from the lovingly nostalgic to a pretty much full-on rocker that somehow still maintains that exact level of yearn to finale “Begin Again” that wraps itslef in a deft sense of wistfulness aswirl in, as one might expect, the irony at the heart of its title.

In the end one marvels at the sustained level of excellence still thriving amongst those thast arose out of that Hoboken/Maxwell’s milieu a half a lifetime ago. One can only summon guesses that run from the odds-against surmisal that it was just dumb luck to the ludicrous (“must be something in the water”) to the most likely yet still too remarkable to believe which has the Fates in all their elusive wisdom collectively deciding that that was, as it has been in those places mentioned above to which we’ll go ahead and add SF, Manchester, LA, Seattle etc, the place at that time and how lucky for us that the buzz created in that particular Jersey beehive hasn’t only not abated but has continued to humbly flourish like the force of indie nature that it is.