Deer Tick Wrote a Whole Record About Us, and It Sounds Like Federal Hill at Midnight
Every so often a band you've watched grow up in your own bars turns around and hands the city a love letter. That's what "Coin-O-Matic," Deer Tick's ninth album — out June 5 on ATO — actually is: a Rhode Island record, front to back, made by the Providence lifers who've spent two decades being the closest thing this state has to a house band.
John McCauley started Deer Tick here in the mid-2000s, and the group's annual holiday residencies have long functioned as a de facto state holiday. But "Coin-O-Matic" is the first time he's turned the lens directly on the place. Self-produced (a break from the Dave Fridmann sessions of recent years), 11 songs, 44 minutes of heartland rock filtered through a very specific 401 sensibility — the mobsters, the mills, the Catholic-vs-Protestant melodramas of an earlier Rhode Island.
"Most of the stories on the album are from my parents' generation and the generation before that, when the idea of a Catholic and a Protestant getting together was very scandalous," McCauley told the press ahead of release. And the killer line, the one that ought to be on a State House plaque: "I think Rhode Island deserves to be a contender for a place that people sing about."
He goes further, describing the sound as "a country record set in an urban environment — there's definitely some outlaws in there." Which is exactly right. This isn't twang cosplay. It's what happens when you grow up seeing guys on the six o'clock news and then running into them at a restaurant on Federal Hill — McCauley's own image, and anyone who came up here knows the feeling in their bones.
Why does it matter beyond hometown pride? Because for years the national story about Providence music was the noise scene — the Fort Thunder mythology, Lightning Bolt's bass-and-drums apocalypse — and the Americana lane got treated like a lesser export. "Coin-O-Matic" is a mid-career band planting a flag: you can write the Great Rhode Island Novel in three chords and mean every word.
The record's been in heavy rotation on local airwaves since June, and if you missed the release window, consider this your nudge. Deer Tick don't have a hometown album-release blowout on the summer books as of this writing, but they've got a set at Newport Folk in a couple weeks — which, for a band this rooted, is about as close to a hometown coronation as the geography allows.
Play it loud, with the windows down, somewhere between the Cranston line and the bay. It was built for exactly that.
Sources: Deer Tick — Coin-O-Matic (ATO Records); Americana UK