Massy Ferguson - You Can’t Tell Me I’m Not What I Used To Be (2025)

Seattle band Massy Ferguson have fired up the diesel and gotten ready to plough a straight furrow back to what’s been expected of them for the better part of two decades. “You Can’t Tell Me I’m Not What I Used to Be” is a declaration that crops will not be rotated, fans are going to get the same high-energy, guitar-driven rock they’ve become accustomed to over the previous six albums.

Twenty years is a long time in music, yet in the case of Massy Ferguson it’s only solidified their core base. This is your basic bar band. Nothing wrong with that at all. It’s that regional band that comes around your favourite hangout or roadhouse two, three or more times a year. Their songs are always familiar, whether old or new, like comfortable hoodies or jeans that you put on when you don’t want to surprise anyone and go for comfort. This band is no anomaly that refuses to be pigeonholed or compartmentalized by style, sound or genre. They have their niche and probably welcome it.

Like Massey Ferguson the tractor company whose motto is “Born to Farm,” the band of (almost) the same name’s could be “Born to Rock.” Frontman Ethan Anderson has a knack for melody, but his arrangements and lyrics can be on the plain side. The plan was to officially leave their comfort zone and chase down a more arty, cinematic version of rootsy American music with help from producer Damien Jurado, an idiosyncratic, eclectic folksinger. Upon listening to the eleven tracks on the album, it seems Massy Ferguson has changed Jurado more than vice versa.

“We’re getting out of the bars,” Anderson notes. “We’re expanding to other rooms, and we’re using different sounds. Maybe this is a fork in the road, where we start to go in a new direction.”

You can applaud their desire to explore other sounds, other rooms, but there’s also nothing wrong with sticking with what you do best as on the “Joe’s Meat & Grocery” album – no frills, just the basics where on a good night they’ll sound like the Georgia Satellites or REO Speedwagon and on a so-so night sound like the Drive-By Truckers after playing one show too many. In other words more songs like ‘Save What Couldn’t Be Saved’ and fewer like ‘I Don’t Know Why.’ On the new album, you could substitute the power pop of ‘When You’re Not Around’ (more of) and ‘I’m Almost There’ (less).

On ‘When You’re Not Around,’ Anderson writes a narrative twist that has his narrator watching his girlfriend getting all dressed up (fishnets) to go perform. The band – Anderson on vocals and bass; Adam Monda on guitars and vocals; Dave Goedde on drums and percussion; and Fred Slater on piano and keyboards – plays if fast and loose, which works for them.

Sometimes we expect too much from bands, suggesting they try something different on for size, expand their horizons and all that, but if you’re coaching the NFL Seattle Seahawks, you wouldn’t ask the nose tackle to cover a receiver like Justin Jefferson. No, you’d tell him just plug up the middle. Three chords and a cloud of dust.

The songs are a little too focused on the songwriter or narrator’s personal struggles with women and drugs and not necessarily in that order. But repetitiveness is what people who frequent roadhouses demand. They want to feel not think, and my guess is Massy Ferguson is a band that knows how to make people feel like letting their hair down and having a blast. This is a band that is probably best appreciated in a live setting.

This is an album filled with vintage sounds and production, sharp guitars, upright piano, a pounding rhythm section, the bedrock of Massy Ferguson’s sound. Yes, there are a couple good tracks on here, but if you are still listening to this album five years later, you are one of the faithful.