Jesse Welles, courtesy of the artist’s website
You should be paying attention to Jesse Welles – an artist who has been releasing self-recorded videos of of-the-moment folk songs over the course of the past year.
I happened upon his anti-war song “War isn’t Murder” on YouTube back in April – a wry take on the war in Gaza, recorded somewhere in the woods in Arkansas. Since then, about once a week or so, Jesse has released a new song in the same fashion – just a man and a guitar (and sometimes a harmonica) singing to birds and bugs and a camera on a tripod.
His simple set-up might be familiar to people who caught last year’s viral song “Rich Men North of Richmond” by Oliver Anthony. Though both artists sing from a kind of Middle-American-angst, this and their woodsy backdrop are where the similarities end. While Anthony puts his not-unformidable voice in “Rich Men” to conservative moaning about taxes and the eating habits of the poor, Welles goes after the fast food industry that profits off our sickness.
Indeed, there is an anti-capitalist through-line in much of the work – a kind of Woodie Guthrie for the YouTube era. But, since we’re here in earth year 2024, these aren’t hopeful and folksy protest anthems. Nor are they nostalgic or patriotic (though doesn’t he have a bit of a John Mellencamp energy?). Instead, he sneers through satirical and caustic takes on our modern giants of industry, goes after the stupidity of bigotry, and takes as many jabs at liberal hypocrisy with a gravelly voice that matches his raw delivery. Alongside “Fast Food” he makes time to call out other specters haunting rural America: Walmart, opioids, and, most recently, the Health Insurance industry.
But among the more topical songs you’ll find a few other preoccupations in his catalog, including songs that clearly touch on dealing with depression, and a handful that seem to be about romance on the rocks. And then, once in a great while he’ll release just the most wholesome and loving song about nature, including possibly my favorite yet, this ode to bugs–
Welles has had a fairly successful decade-long rock and folk career and has released several albums under other bands and names. But, I haven’t really checked that out. Right now, I’m content to see him drop a new song once a week or so through YouTube, and shake my head knowing I’m witnessing a unique talent who has managed to find a way to make great music while actually saying something.
Outside of YT much of the rest of my listening this year has been dominated by two albums. The first half of the year I wore out The Smile’s Wall of Eyes and in the later half MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks.
The Smile is of course the post-covid incarnation of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood with new drummer Tom Skinner. Their 2022 debut, A Light for Attracting Attention was a kinetic grab-bag of rock experiments from a band clearly enjoying the thrill of exploring new sounds for a new band stepping back out into a new world.
Now, on this sophomore effort Wall of Eyes, the trio seem to have rapidly synthesized the spooky propulsiveness of Radiohead, the meditative feel of Thom Yorke’s solo and soundtrack work, and A Light’s searching energy on a cohesive and expertly paced album that (in this 30-plus-year Radiohead fan’s opinion) is the best album Yorke and Greenwood have released since Radiohead’s high point, 2007’s In Rainbows.
I’ve been a fan of Radiohead longer than MJ Lenderman – at just 25 years of age – has been alive, and yet his music feels like a Radiohead contemporary. I happened upon the hit “Wristwatch,” which endears with a kind of slacker parody of tokenized masculinity, and then rocks out a moody alt-country groove a-la Jason Molina. It’s a ’90s indie-rock sound, perhaps most closely compared to bands like Pavement or Built to Spill, but one that feels like a reaction to the social media era.
Manning Fireworks on the whole is a vibe-perfect mix of somber confessions and light-hearted goofs, often in the same plaintive drawl. You can feel the album’s lonely country undercurrent, but any time it might veer into self-pity, it instead course-corrects into wry grunge-era humor giving it an overall feel of ragged warmth. Many of these tracks succeed at quietly roasting toxic masculinity, while at the same time staking out their own shaggy laconic space of good-dude-energy. The moody slacker has been sorely missing from indie rock, and MJ (geez, his initials even invoke the mid-’90s) brings him back in full form. It’s partly nostalgia, sure, but it’s been a damn comfortable space for this Gen-X/Millennial-cusper to “hang-out,” like a familiar flannel over a black t-shirt just as fall weather is coming on. | Mike McCubbins
