by David Wilikofsky
Tyler Jordan moved to Austin at the age of 19. First introduced to music in his family’s church, he spent his early days in the city busking on its streets before meeting Jake Ames. The two became fast friends, playing in local bands together and eventually (along with bassist Robert Cherry and drummer Phillip Dunne) deciding to form their own band, Good Looks. Perhaps the best description of the group comes from their own website: they’re “a bar band searching for common ground and yearning for a better system.” On their debut album, they rail against inhumane power structures by searching for the humanity crushed beneath them.
Bummer Year‘s songs bounce between carefully observed personal histories and indictments of the capitalist system. The former shine brightest at their most evocative and detailed; “First Crossing” captures the giddiness of sharing your hometown with a new love, while closer “Walker Lake” remembers a trip to a state park with a troubled friend. The latter are calls to arms, contemplating everything from the way that power divides us to the difficulty of making a living off music in a society that doesn’t value it fairly. It’s all backed by sturdy, workmanlike heartland rock melodies, the kind that wouldn’t feel out of place on a classic Bruce Springsteen album. They’re a group that can conjure up the expanse of a Texas landscape one moment and jump into an epic guitar solo the next.
If there’s any criticism to be levied at Bummer Year, it’s that on the surface it doesn’t seem to cohere into anything more than a stellar collection of songs; however, tracks like the titular one push against that idea. It starts as an ode to the places that made you, with Jordan singing about his friends who voted for Trump and joined a motorcycle gang. Though it’s clear he strongly disagrees with their political stances, rather than impugning them he calls for unity. No matter where we find ourselves on the political spectrum, our individual voices don’t make a sound through “piles of money”. Jordan wants us to remember that we’re all workers, cogs in the capitalist machine whose ability to affect real change and make a more equitable world for all can only be realized by finding common ground. It’s a song that shows the power this band can wield when they bridge the personal and political themes that permeate the album.
Bummer Year is undoubtedly an excellent rock album, but it’s also the sound of a band finding the most effective ways of expressing both their outrage at unfair systems and their empathy for individuals caught in them. This is only the beginning for Good Looks, and I can’t wait to hear what comes next.