What’s so special about Tuesday night? Nothing really, which is exactly why Boston trio Halfsour titled their latest album, Tuesday Night Live, to reflect its overarching theme: a celebration of everyday events.
A tenuous reference to SNL, the album title antithesizes what the show represents – excitement, glamour, fame – and replaces these attributes with ones that are more attune to average life and the uneventful occurrences of Tuesday nights.
Although Tuesday Night Live is by no means groundbreaking in the realms of alternative rock, it is, nonetheless, an ode to average people and a delightful listen for those who revel in lazy indie-pop.
Released in late January, Tuesday Night Live is the band’s fourth album since 2013 and undoubtedly their most polished and cohesive record yet. Multi-talented members Matthew Mara, Ian Gustafson and Zoë Wyner showcase their versatile abilities, swapping vocal duties throughout the album. Each holds their own, but the strongest songs on the album – “I.K.” and “Mood Monster” – feature Wyner on vocals. Wyner’s voice is not only more enjoyable than her band members’, but her vocals are also clearest, which makes it easier to decipher what the lyrics mean, making “I.K.” and “Mood Monster” the most comprehensive songs on the album.
Whether it’s a function of artistic liberty or low-quality equipment, the vocals are muted and distant, evoking a retro rock nostalgia that perfectly complements the content of the lyrics – cigarette-length conversations, lost love, and twenty-something optimism.
The album opener, “What You’re Waiting,” begins with a banal line about cooking dinner (“Your pot is simmering, it’s almost done”) followed by a few lines of nearly complete gibberish until the melody begins with “I don’t know what you’re waiting for.” Equally mundane and almost unintelligible lyrics are also present throughout the rest of the album. In “Employees Must Wash Hands” the chorus is something along the lines of “you keep the hat on, you keep the coat on, like a supernova, don’t wanna know ya.” In many cases when Mara or Gustafson are singing, it’s not easy to discern what’s being said.
The subdued percussion and bass take a backseat to the storytelling aspect of the album, allowing emphasis to remain on vocals and guitar. The result is a refreshingly unaggressive yet engaging collection of songs.
Short and sweet, Tuesday Night Live times out at 31 minutes with an average song length of two minutes. Falling somewhere in the mediocre zone between stop-what-you’re-doing-and-listen-to-this and earsplittingly awful, Halfsour’s album is an easy, pretty good listen.
Lamenting and celebrating their ordinary lives with straightforward lyrics and lethargic guitar riffs, Tuesday Night Live is the perfect album to listen to while cooking plain rice for dinner… for the second night in a row. Tuesday nights will probably remain uneventful, but this album reminds us that there might actually be something special about that.