Greg Freeman's third album, All Set the Bone, arrives as an ambitious double-album that expands the Maryland singer-songwriter's sonic palette but sacrifices some of the immediate appeal that made last year's Burnover a breakthrough.
Released on Transgressive, All Set the Bone channels Freeman's strained, high-energy vocal style into songs that feel deliberately uncomfortable. On tracks like Marooned, frantic guitar and drums generate queasy unease. The album opener, Cahokia, starts as a great American road song before descending into what the Guardian's review describes as "proggy bedlam." Lyrically, Freeman explores anxieties both personal and existential, asking on Culture: "Who do you look to when you're all on your own? When all your heroes lost their microphones?"
Freeman broke through last year with Burnover, a collection of tight story-songs balanced between wit, delirium and devastation. That album paired Freeman's literary sensibility with loud, riff-heavy music that could sit comfortably on mainstream rock radio. All Set the Bone takes a different approach.
The double-album is several orders more ambitious in scale, but its songwriting leans toward the imagistic and diffuse rather than the direct storytelling that defined its predecessor. Freeman wrote the album while travelling through the US and processing major personal change. That searching quality comes through in the finished product, according to the review. The album contains fewer immediate fireworks than Burnover, though Freeman retains considerable spark throughout.
The Guardian's assessment suggests All Set the Bone is an impressive record that asks listeners to invest patience in its vision, even if it doesn't hook as quickly as the work that preceded it.