ALBUM REVIEW: Stew – A Will Away
A stew is a hearty wintertime meal. It’s filled to the brim with warmth, conjuring up reminders of home when home seems far away. But to be in a stew is to be stuck in a state of great anxiety and agitation, to be lost to your thoughts. Whichever meaning makes more sense for you, you’ll find something to fill up your stomach with A WILL AWAY’s new album Stew. It picks up where 2019’s change-of-pace EP Soup left off. If inside jokes about hearty meals aren’t whetting your appetite, you might want to hold fire for the main course. If 2017’s Here Again was a bland buffet of last night’s leftovers, Stew is a tasting menu banquet befitting the palette of culinary critics.
It’s clear from opener The Rock’s 90’s-inspired slow burn indie that A WILL AWAY have learnt a lot about writing songs since Here Again. However, The Rock is merely an hors d’oeuvres in comparison to Karma’s midwest musing. Filled to the brim with midwest emo trademarks, it’s a chiming guitar-driven chunk of college music.
It’s a great start, but at times Stew does find you chewing on a few bones. The token acoustic ballad belongs to Parachute, a dense derailing of the pace that feels like you’ve added too much liquid to your cake, while Speechless ventures off into COUNTING CROW’s Americana roots-rock without warming up the oven first, coming out undercooked.
Of course, Stew isn’t an album that sets out its stall to redefine or revive a genre. But it is an album that offers a lot for you to stew on lyrically, in whichever way you please. It’s a deep dive into the psyche of frontman Matthew Carlson, exploring the ways our experiences shape our lives. At times, it’s a metaverse of Easter eggs and callbacks to their back catalogue, with lyrics so specific you need a microscope to relate to them; but don’t worry, it’s for that very reason that Stew is so endearing.
Spittin’ Chiclets is an exercise in stringing together tongue-twisters and keeping them catchy. It also doubles up as an ultra-specific deep-dive into a single moment in Carlson’s life, which is where Stew sets itself apart from other albums: it feels like every song is an episode in a long-running series you’ve fallen for (and there’s the warmth we were talking about). There’s something simple yet comforting about the detail Carlson drives home in lines like “Pretty penny for a vinyl sider/Sippin’ whippets out of whipped cream cans/Feeding skittles to a hungry spider.”
On Stew, A WILL AWAY graduate from boys to men, swapping out misplaced pop-punk for midwest emo and indie-rock, riddled with maturity. Whilst it’s missing a few ingredients, Stew is an album you can dive into like a hearty, home-cooked meal on a rainy day and feel at home. And that’s a skill few of their peers have learnt to master.
Rating: 7/10
Stew is set for release on February 18th via Rude Records.
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