The Underground of Happiness

What is more thrilling than a well crafted piece of songwriting? Frontier Ruckus are a band from Detroit who make sublime teasing guitar pop, a kind that portrays the current twenty something generation mercilessly but still with a degree of affection. On the up on the face of it but holding on to a melancholy undercurrent that drags it back, some vague feeling of being lost. Look no further than the wonderful ‘Our flowers are still burning’, a twisting turning puzzle of a lyric that uses sprightly acoustic guitar and banjo as a decoy, a thin disguise for the sad streak running through a life. The opening line should have you on its hook in seconds. In the sunken silhouette of your drunken pillowette Elsewhere the album paints a bleak but vivid American landscape of dexedrine, ibuprofen, looking for work on Craigslist, infernally hot summers in Detroit, prozac, shitty jobs, dysfunction, e-cigarettes, in the arcade throwing darts, the hollowing out of city communities ...