Scud Mountain Boys - Do You Love The Sun (2013)

Do You Love the Sun, the first new collection of songs to appear from Massachusetts-based alt-country/Northern gothic folk quartet Scud Mountain Boys since 1996, pretty much picks up where things left off. Warm, weary, and congenially intimate, Joe Pernice, Stephen Desaulniers, Bruce Tull, and Tim Shea have crafted a fine new set of understated anthems for the terminally wistful and forlorn, all of which strut and fret their hour upon the stage in that elusive grey area between melancholic, bottle-strewn, front-porch country and resigned, Sunday afternoon, post-pot roast AM pop. The album boasts its fair share of last-call, midtempo juke joint laments ("Crown of Thorns," "Drew Got Shot," "You're Mine"), but Pernice's pop pedigree, which has been honed over the years through a steady stream of solo and full band (the Pernice Brothers, Chappaquiddick Skyline) releases, muscles its way to the surface on some of the record's better moments, like the lush and languid "Theme from Midnight Cowboy," the weepy "Double Bed," and the cleverly subversive, suburban blues tale "The Mendicant," the latter of which deftly and comically, albeit darkly, provides a rusty bridge between the boys of old and the men they have since become.