by David Wilikofsky
Landowner are one of the most distinctive bands working today. Before even hitting play on a Landowner song you know what you’re going to get: twitchy, angular punk music, a constellation of geometries built out of repeated musical phrases. Lead singer and songwriter Dan Shaw will rant and rave over those grooves, contorting his voice while railing against some status quo. It’s a schtick they’ve perfected over three stellar albums, and one that they continue to refine on their latest, Escape the Compound. It’s an album that shows the band doing what they do best while hinting at how they may evolve in the future.
When I reviewed Blatant back in 2020, I said it was a new high water mark for the band. It was an album that grappled with the ills of the world around it with both sadness and humor, and Escape the Compound is very much cut from the same cloth. Its central theme is the slowly dissolving line between truth and fiction; the band explores how people may become susceptible to falsehoods (“Nineties”), how they are manipulated to believe them (“Victim of a Narcissist’s Tactics”) and how they may one day may see the light of day and need to escape (“Escape the Compound”). Elsewhere they tackle ecological disasters (“Heat Wave”, “Floodwatch”), arguably one of the real life consequences of this sort of brainwashing. This fits seamlessly together with their musical style, its minimalism and terseness amping up the tension and paranoia in the lyrics.
Landowner clearly have a signature sound, but the most exciting parts of Escape the Compound are the ones that stretch them into new territory. “Slow Tactics” is the sludgiest and heaviest the band have ever sounded. The titular song stretches out over eight minutes, a multi part suite whose stylistic hairpin turns animate its story of escape from some unnamed captors; after minutes of slowly simmering tension the band accelerates to a breakneck pace as the actual escape begins, using their instrumentals as a narrative device. The call and response on a couple of these songs feels like a throwback to the B-52’s, while others have a bit more Devo-esque new wave energy. These moments, both large and small, show that Landowner are far more than a one hit wonder; though they’ve perfected their brand of nervy punk, they prove there are plenty of ways they can evolve their sound.