The Sam Chase’s Great White Noise

Album Review By Shimmy Boyle

Hold onto your butts!  Folk rock darlings The Sam Chase & The Untraditional have done it again.

Their latest release, Great White Noise, is by turns a raucous barnstormer of an album, a gritty meditation rife with nostalgia, and a coldly burning manifesto of political rage. It’s a bit of a musical contradiction. And that’s a good thing.

When it hits, it hits hard. Tilting from the sparse intensity of Chase alone with his guitar, to the cunningly arranged full power of The Untraditional, it’s anything but predictable. At its best moments, the album unapologetically kicks down the door and slaps you in the face with music, leaving you rolling around on the floor screaming “please sir may I have another?”

If you only have the attention span for a song or two before you have to check your Snapchat, lend your ears to the lead track “I’ve Got Problems”, a catchy little diddy that builds into an anthemic ballad; the slow jam groove “There For Me”; or the heavy-hitting “What Is All The Rage?”

The feat of contradiction that Chase and the band pull off here is that on an album that is unquestionably angry and political, there is also an air of celebration. Something festive, a sense of victory.  And while it’s not standing-on-a-mountaintop-bathing-in-the-blood-of-your-enemies victory, it’s still a pretty nice feeling.  Maybe it’s that in spite of the strange and disturbing reality that is America in 2016, Chase still manages to seem hopeful.  Or it might just be that the songs are catchy as hell.  Whatever it is, it works.

Their album release is this Friday, April 29th at The Great American Music Hall with Dead Winter Carpenters and Marty O’Reilly & the Old Soul Orchestra.