During the CD boom of the ’90s, listeners cherished the format for its light weight and compact size. For artists, the design held a bigger benefit: the space to go long without sacrificing quality. With runtime no longer limited to two sides of a vinyl record, musicians weren’t forced to leave bonus tracks on the cutting room floor or debate stuffing songs onto a cassette tape with grainy audio. Naturally, tracklists expanded. That bloat returned in the mid-2010s during the adoption of streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. With digital streams now counting toward Billboard chart rankings, artists started unrolling tracklists like carpet runners in long hallways, inflating their odds of scoring a hit.
When sprawling albums morphed from indulgent artistic expression into an industry-approved method to game the system, I found myself distrusting the intent of most hour-plus records. If we’re going to go long, then commit to the length by crafting an intricate world or reveling in the journey itself—tasks far easier said than done. Bruiser and Bicycle got the message for Deep Country. While their sophomore album, 2023’s Holy Red Wagon, stuck its toe over the hour line by a single minute, their third LP saunters in sound and runtime, clocking in at just shy of 75 minutes. The Albany quartet rummage through a bin of acoustic instruments and vocal tricks to indulge in the art of low-key merrymaking until you lose track of time alongside them.
Bandleaders and multi-instrumentalists Keegan Graziane and Nicholas Whittemore, bassist Zahra Houacine, and drummer Joe Taurone downshift from Holy Red Wagon’s hyper-energetic prog-pop into Deep Country’s mellowed-out experimental folk. On first pass, Deep Country appears tame by comparison, teed up by the lone guitar plucking away on its pensive opener, “Dance and Devotion.” But when you greet the album not as a slow walker blocking the sidewalk but a sightseer taking in every detail, the deviations poke out in abundance. It’s the fleeting glockenspiel and whispered lyrics in the waltz “Silence, Silence,” Taurone drumming on what sounds like oversized plastic buckets in the carnivalesque “21st Century Humor,” or the acoustic guitar arpeggio and trembling synths breaking up the spaced-out drum fills on “O’ There’s a Sign.” In prioritizing momentum over big hooks or solos, their eventual appearance feels that much more special.
