Assumption

Description

Western Massachusetts band Landowner play abrasively-clean minimalist punk. Singer Dan Shaw started Landowner in 2016, writing and recording the projects debut Impressive Almanac with a practice amp and a laptop drum machine. Shaws initial concept was a made-up genre called weak d-beat, meant to sound intentionally absurd as if Antelope were reading the sheet music of Discharge. When Shaw joined with his current bandmates in 2017, they translated these early experiments in restraint, minimalism, and caricatured hardcore as a live band. This provided Landowner with its own unique set of blueprints: the guitars slap hard without using any distortion or effects, the rhythm section is tight, fast, and repetitious, and the song structures make space for lyrics that reflect on the global systems and dark absurdities our lives are tangled in. Comparisons could be made to The Fall, Lungfish, or Uranium Club, but across their five albums, they make it clear: Landowner just sound like Landowner.

Assumption is the bands fifth album. Sonically, it captures the vibrancy and intensity of their live performances. The album title Assumption encapsulates the albums multi-layered themes. We make assumptions, taking in information online through an overload of decontextualized snippets and headlines, and then quickly form conclusions, or we allow artificial intelligence to do the thinking for us. Assumption is the sound of a band that established its own musical identity and has reached a place of tightness with an ease gained from years of playing together, sounding mechanically precise and at the same time fully human. It may be the bands most cohesive and fully realized work to date.