The Cambridge trio of Jaime d'Almeida, Jason DeWaard and David Zimmerman began life as d'Almeida's songwriting alias. The 2021 album *Chasing A Sound* was a lockdown patchwork, with d'Almeida and DeWaard mixing tracks together but separately, in two different places, and d'Almeida's daughters chipping in backing vocals and percussion. It was charming and handsomely written, but the sound of people working at a distance. This follow-up is the sound of them in the same room, with Zimmerman's drums snapping and shoving at the songs from behind. The guitars, bass and keys swap hands and never crowd one another. Nobody is showing off. Everyone is listening.
"I Just Got Your Cable" shows the method. Fuzzy guitars grind over a revving, brooding bassline while the drums keep a patient, slightly menacing pace. D'Almeida sings high and a little detached, like a man narrating his own surveillance footage. A song that seems to be about waiting for something to arrive curdles, line by line, into something more obsessive, and the tune never stops being catchy while it does. "Sun to Shade" then slows everything to a heavy-footed amble. Thumping beats and a dark bass hold up a meditation on life's opposites: light and dark, love and hurt, arriving and leaving. It's the sort of song you'd expect to sag at that tempo, and it doesn't.
Elsewhere the band turn tender without going soft. "Aim Here (Roots and Wings)" is a wistful, slow-burning ballad that earns its warmth by refusing to hurry. "Echo (Party Pack Shortage)" has a title so gloriously odd that you sense d'Almeida grinning as he wrote it. His wordplay has always been the sharpest thing in his kit, and here it's sharper still, a knack for turning an awkward, cluttered thought into a line you can hum. "Way It Is" closes the record with a percussive shrug, a rueful acceptance that somehow feels like defiance.
The lyrics stay close to home and close to the bone. Trust, boundaries, the frustration of trying to be decent inside systems that seem to have stopped working: these are heavy subjects, and d'Almeida never lets them anchor the tunes. The family resemblance is to the American guitar records of the nineties, the Boston-area shrug and crunch, but it feels like inheritance rather than cosplay. This is a band using old tools to talk about now.
If you like your rock varnished to a high shine, the frayed edges here may snag. They are the whole point. The looseness is the record's argument, and it's the reason a song can lurch into its chorus like a man catching a bus and still arrive on time.
*Bass River Sessions* is thoughtful without being pious, rough without being careless, and, for a record so preoccupied with uncertainty, remarkably sure of itself. Ten songs, three musicians, no hiding place. It's a small marvel of gritty, hook-laden good sense.