Atta Boy - Big Heart Manners (2020)

When you wait eight years to come up with a follow-up album – especially when you were fresh out of college on your début – there’s no guarantee that you will be the same musicians on the second release. It also reveals a casual approach to the band, not needing to keep up the machinery of the operation, but reactivating it when you know the time is right.

There’s certainly some of that laid-back attitude in this release from LA-based Atta Boy (not to be confused with the Indiana quartet Attaboy). The opening shuffle ‘Shade’ refuses to start the album with a bang, preferring to draw the listener in at its own pace, and the next track ‘Devoted’ similarly ambles along.

One result of the long hiatus is that the band members are more mature, having seen a bit more of the world and honed their musical direction in the meantime. That maturity is reflected in the woodwind that decorates ‘Boxer’ (all tracks have single-word titles – another sign of the relaxed approach to the disc; why bother with several words when one will do?).

Another advantage is that there is little chance of it being padded out with filler. You can build up a good collection of songs over eight years. Every track earns its place here (except for the lacklustre ‘Night’, perhaps, which is the one piece where the vocals are subdued, lurking under an organ drone).

Elsewhere singer Eden Brolin is very up-front in the mix throughout (and yes, she is Josh Brolin’s daughter). There is little break from the vocals – just a couple of slide solos in ‘Corpus’ – meaning that these songs are relatively short, with all the fat trimmed off. Four come in at under three minutes fifteen. It’s also refreshing that they eschew the factory type of structure: verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus. As a result, the songs never outstay their welcome.

While the album is an alt-folk-Indie release, it has strong shades of country, whether the pedal steel that wraps itself around Brolin’s vocals like a string of lights around a Christmas tree on ‘Devoted’, or the vocals themselves on ‘Corpus’, where her accent comes through strongly.

Don’t expect to get any consistent themes across the album. Some songs are personal, some based on a grisly dream (‘Shade’) or fictitious characters (‘Lucky’, a song that gives us the album title), at least one has an undisclosed meaning and several have different writers.

Highlights are plenty: ‘There’ has a repetitive chorus, but not in a way that irritates; more like a guitar riff that forms the more-ish foundation for the song. ‘Corpus’, with its insistent 4/4 piano stabs, and ‘Devoted’ have strong hooks. ‘Halfway’ has a lovely descending chord sequence in a chorus that feels more like the end of the verse. Its treated guitar at the end adds a brief shot of psych colour. Closer ‘Madly’ is simply a pretty love song.

The band never expected their début Out of Sorts to go much beyond their own circle of friends and family (it’s one reason for the eight-year break). But although they still don’t plan to become a fixed item, they must know that this release will be heard far and wide. Most of the début’s tracks have acquired a million listens. I see no sign that this will garner any fewer.