Album Of The Week: Lifeguard Ripped And Torn

There are people who make a fine living by closely monitoring this nation's youth sports leagues in hopes of finding players to replenish America's college and professional teams. I wonder if Matador Records has a similar program, but for potential next-generation indie rock stars? The tastemaking institution established its rep by plucking Pavement, Guided by Voices, and Liz Phair from the tape-trading micro-release deep underground, and in the past decade or so it's shown a keen interest in what the young people are getting up to, ushering young acts like Snail Mail, Car Seat Headrest, Julien Baker, and Lucy Dacus into the big leagues after they built up varying degrees of buzz. More recently, the "cool parents and after-school music programs to Matador Records" pipeline remained remarkably strong with the young Chicago trio Horsegirl, and now it's given us the young Chicago trio Lifeguard, an outstanding coup by Matador's perhaps apocryphal youth development division. Raises all around.

For what most of the public will see as a brand new band, there's already just so much going on here. Let's start with the fact that Lifeguard is both the figurative and literal brother band to Horsegirl; bassist and vocalist Asher Case, 19, and drummer Isaac Lowenstein, 18, were both originally members of that group, which also includes Lowenstein's sister Penelope. Case's dad Brian is in the experimental group FACS and has also played in Disappears and the long-running group the Ponys, and I had to fact check that Lowenstein's dad isn't Jason Loewenstein from Sebadoh. (He's not, but that would have made sense, right?)

Lifeguard sit at the center of Chicago's buzzing Hallogallo scene, which also includes Friko and Dwaal Troupe and is named after a zine that guitarist and singer Kai Slater began publishing during COVID as a way to stay connected to the friends he met through the local DIY scene shortly before everything shut down. With his solo project Sharp Pins he also released last year's Radio DDR, reissued this year by K Records imprint Perennial to wide acclaim, and he produced the debut solo album from Stranger Things actor Finn Wolfhard, also dropping this week.

Lifeguard's early EPs Crowd Can Talk and Dressed In Trenches were recorded at the late Steve Albini's Electrical Audio Studios, a holy place. Also, Case and Lowenstein met in 2019 at a School of Rock camp, bonding over a shared love of goddamn Tortoise. Honestly, if I saw a movie where a 12-year-old was opining about TNT deep cuts, I would roll my eyes and assume a screenwriter was trying way too hard to signal that a precocious youngster Wasn't Like The Other Kids. But it's a big world out there. All kinds of things happen.

OK, so we have a trio of impossibly cool kids with a bit of a pedigree and the sort of intensely close friendship you can only have when you're young but will spend the rest of your life chasing (they're all neighbors who practice their music and watch movies all day) who have risen to Hot New Thing status, and who are out here repping the things underground music was built on but sometimes loses sight of: community and scene-building via tiny spots and zines, handmade objects created in service of developing a subculture where restless youths can discover each other and themselves. There's a lot here to make you excited, or to make you hesitant if you're reasonably suspicious of media narratives that are almost too perfect, too seemingly designed to make your heart swell by touching upon that which has long been sacred to a certain type of fan with a certain type of taste. We music writers love our narratives, and I'm admittedly clocking in early at the myth-making factory. But none of this extratextual stuff ever matters if the music doesn't deliver. Fortunately, Lifeguard's official debut album, Ripped And Torn more than delivers.

Based largely around improvisations that they later shaped into tight, noisy pop songs, Ripped And Torn often feels like thumbing through the Spin Alternative Record Guide and thinking to yourself, "I didn't know people were still into this stuff." You have the screeching feedback and explosive guitar pyrotechnics of Hüsker Dü and the Wipers, the droll, dubby baselines of the Slits (especially on the title track, which keeps threatening to boil over before the band undercut the expected release by running sidelong into creeping negative space), the joie de vivre of Bleach-era Nirvana, the head-rush pop of Vivian Girls. There's even a bit of Spaceman 3's ands Animal Collective's willingness to follow an idea wherever it goes, even if it wants to fall apart, as the collage interlude "Music For 3 Drums" does, charmingly so. But none of this ever sounds like a regurgitation of indie rock's past. It sounds like a renewal, a way forward.

Produced by No Age's Randy Randall, this is music that clangs and scrapes like a guitar dragged across a metal table, held together with duct tape and enthusiasm. It gives you the pleasures you want from noisy indie punk, but at unexpected times and sideways angles. "Under Your Reach" is pushed on by a propulsive, minimal bassline from Case and insistent work from Loewenstein, creating a tension that never gets resolved, sweetened just a bit with interlocking harmonies. This band can get a lot out of a little; "(I Wanna) Break Out" creates a feeling of suffocating dread in a minute and a half with nervous, slashing guitars and snarling low end, catharsis arriving in drips and drabs via desperate screams as the walls close in.

While they are resistant to being too straightforward, Lifeguard show a keen knack for balancing their experimental instincts with their talent for anthems. Opener "A Tightwire" delivers explosive catharsis via grinding guitars that often sound like power tools. "It Will Get Worse" cleans things up just enough, throwing in some Kinks-derived garage rock la-la-las and serrated jangle, demonstrating power pop smarts they can flash whenever they feel like it.

The lyrics all play like overheard fragments from an anxious young person's inner monologue, pissed about the world they'll soon inherit. Slater seethes on "A Tightwire" that "I am unmoving/ 'Til the time comes to suck my teeth in." Images of stasis and the feeling that you're stuck constantly recur, from "It Will Get Worse" ("Always find you are/ Running out of line/ Running out of time") to "How to Say Deisar" ("Spun out on afterglow/ I tragically underspend/ Spun out no place to go/ We don't ask and we don't show") — perhaps a result of an adolescence cut short by a pandemic and wracked with free-floating cultural anxiety, perhaps a result of watching the world continue to move backwards and an acute feeling that their generation has already been abandoned, so it's up to them to take care of each other. I truly wish them well.

But while unease fuels Lifeguard's music, so does joy and camaraderie: the feeling of finding your place in an unmoored world, of creating something better for you and your friends, and for showing others they can do it as well. Nothing is ever fully lost. There are people around this band's age who will not only soon discover their favorite band but an entirely different way to approach the world. They'll discover the old ways still work and are more needed than ever, and I don't doubt for a moment that it will change their life.

Lifeguard - Ripped And Torn [LP]

24.99

Amazon

Other albums of note out this week:
• Pulp's More
• Turnstile's Never Enough
• Lil Wayne's Tha Carter VI
• Little Simz's Lotus
• Addison Rae's Addison
• Finn Wolfhard's Happy Birthday
• McKinley Dixon's Magic, Alive!
• Purelink's Faith
• Hayden Pedigo's I'll Be Waving As You Drive Away
• For Your Health's This Bitter Garden
• Options' Beast Mode
• Wavves' Spun
• Landlady's Make Up / Lost Time
• Ben LaMar Gay's Yowzers
• Renée Elise Goldsberry's Who I Really Am
• Hailey Whitters' Corn Queen
• Brian Eno & Beatie Wolfe's Luminal & Lateral
• Marina's Princess Of Power
• Caamp's Copper Changes Colors
• Alien Nosejob's Forced Communal Existence
• Various artists' ANTHEMS: A Celebration Of Broken Social Scene's You Forgot It In People
• Black Moth Super Rainbow's Soft New Magic Dream
• Carriers' Every Time I Feel Afraid
• Attention Bird Utopia's Best Of Kings
• Born Ruffians' Beauty's Pride
• Cynthia Erivo's I Forgive You
• The Doobie Brothers' Walk The Road
• Lucy Gooch’s Desert Window
• Phoebe Rings' Aseurai
• Smug Brothers' Stuck On Beta
• Volbeat's God Of Angels Trust
• Frankie & The Witch Fingers' Trash Classic
• Amanda DeBoer Bartlett's Braided Together
• The Kentucky Gentlemen's Rhinestone Revolution
• Orthodox's A Door Left Open
• The Inspector Cluzo's Less Is More
• Nadah El Shazly's Laini Tani
• Benét's Make 'Em Laugh
• The Knocks & Dragonette's Revelation
• Jon Bellion's Father Figure
• Jools' Violent Delights
• renforshort's A Girl's Experience EP
• Louie TheSinger's One For The Hometown EP
• Stephen Vitiello With Brendan Canty And Hahn Rowe's Second
• Various artists' Magic Power: An All-Star Tribute To Triumph
• GUNNAR's Sun Faded
• Harry The Nightgown's Ugh
• DRIFT's AT THE PARTY
• Activity's A Thousand Years In Another Way
• Gösta Berlings Saga's Forever Now
• Ben de la Cour's New Roses
• Maiya Blaney's A Room With A Door That Closes
• North Mississippi Allstars' Still Shakin’
• Seth MacFarlane's Lush Life: The Lost Sinatra Arrangements
• Stateside's Where You Found Me
• Are We Hunting's Impersonations Of Suffering And True Love
• aron!'s cozy you (and other nice songs) EP
• Katatonia's Nightmares As Extensions Of The Waking State
• GPS' Directions + Destinations
• Vesna Pisarović's Poravna
• Quinton Barnes' BLACK NOISE
• KAONASHI's I Want To Go Home.
• Dustin Douglas & The Electric Gentlemen's IV
• Gruesome's Silent Echoes
• Mary Chapin Carpenter’s Personal History
• Mark Molnar's EXO
• Dominique Fils-Aimé's Live At The Montreal International Jazz Festival
• Royale Lynn's Black Magic
• Rebecca Foon & Aliayta Foon-Dancoes' Reverie
• Peter Manheim's Early Waves
• Dispatch's Yellow Jacket
• American Mile's American Dream
• Tracy Bonham's Sky Too Wide
• Object Collection's Possible Thieves
• Emily Allan's Clanging
• Mother Mother's Nostalgia
• Sabrina Claudio's Fall In Love With Her
• After Ours' Imaginary Friend
• The Mighty Missoula's Ghost In The Mountain
• Loaded Honey's Love Made Trees
• Various artists' F1 THE ALBUM
• Perennial's "A" Is For Abstract: The Complete Art History
• Christian Lee Hutson's Paradise Pop. 10 (Deluxe)
• My Chemical Romance's Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge (Deluxe Edition)
• WAR's Why Can't We Be Friends? (50th Anniversary Collector's Edition)
• Cypress Hill's Cypress Hill And The London Symphony Orchestra: Black Sunday Live At The Royal Albert Hall
• Rascal Flats' Life Is A Highway: Refueled Duets
• Jane Paknia's Millions Of Years Of Longing EP
• Gloria Gaynor's Happy Tears EP
• Beau Jennings' Doves EP
• Pip Blom's Grip EP
• Gingerella's Eat Your Heart Out EP
• Wylderness' Safe Mode EP
• Joe Goodkin's Joe Goodkin EP
• Welsh Wolf's A Voyeur’s Dream EP
• Dog Race's Return The Day EP
• Snow Wife's Bodyology EP
• Elbow's Audio Vertigo Echo Elbow EP 5
• Wild Blessing's From Dust EP
• Kassie Krut's Kassie Krut Expanded EP
• Fruit LoOops' Everything Is Clear To Me Now EP