Heartland rock has always been a touchstone for indie rockers. Let the others play with mining New Wave and synth pop for new angular moves; the return to the tutelage of the Boss is cyclical and inevitable. Wild Pink, straight outta Brooklyn, are another band using the sounds of places much smaller than the one they come from to make their own mark. Why not? The Men, after getting squalling punk rock out of their system on their first album, turned rapidly into trading on this exact sort of thing and it made them great, before they got trapped and were unable to get out again. It’s a sturdy framework to put your own spin on, regardless of where you come from.

Dulling The Horns takes that rustic heartland structure and layers over pure noise. The guitars on this record are heavier than they have a right to be, which is always a plus in my scorekeeping. It ends up sounding like the Felice Brothers playing on the alt rock circuit in the early Nineties, a sort of grunge Bob Seger with a world-weary modern eye. Time passes, these songs say. Things will work out, or they won’t, or more often they’ll be some mixture of the two. “Eating The Egg Whole” talks about the Bullets becoming the Wizards and the Expos becoming the Senators, and how nothing lasts forever but you still drag your stupid self along hoping something new and better will be there at the end. That’s basically the trip through Dulling The Horns – things change, but more often they stay the same, and if you were hoping for something novel by the time the last grimey chord rings out on “Rung Cold”, well, better that you think of that platitude about the journey being its own reward because that’s pretty much it. It’s a good journey, though.

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