A few things are always basically top of mind for me, among them: The Madeleine McCann mystery; what caused the rift between Taylor Swift and Karlie Kloss; the fact that maggots are living under my floorboards; and one specific phrase from Wild Pink’s 2024 album Dulling the Horns. On “Eating the Egg Whole,” John Ross and co. are going full krauty heartland rock, as they are wont to do, and then, right there in the second verse, he just starts riffing about 2003 in America: “The freedom fries were served proudly/The year he finally retirеd from the court/Soon after that, the Montrеal Expos went to D.C., and Baltimore fans never really got on board.” He crams all those words into what feels like a single breath, like it’s some fucked-up mnemonic device he’s using to find his keys. Ross doesn’t tend to write about some mythic America; he writes about America the way the collective probably remembers it: Stupid political gesture → Jordan retires → Baseball disappointment → On and on, forever and ever.
On Still Coming Down, the sixth Wild Pink album, Ross is still crumbing his songs with the crushed detritus of American culture, and doing so with a weird combination of wit and guilelessness that places him somewhere between Dan Bejar and Lana Del Rey. Everything about his music is unshowy—his vocals sit relatively low in the mix, and even when there is a solo, like the one on “Round of Applause at the End of the World,” it’s pretty short and sweet—but that unshowiness almost feels like the point. It’s hard to be a real observer when you’re making a scene. Without reading too much into it, I’d wager a guess that being a New York rock musician whose music isn’t defined by quirked-up main character energy and coming from a background in jingle-writing, working under Cameron Winter’s dad—gives one a good understanding of how to make compelling work from the margins.
No score yet, be the first to add.
Still Coming Down was recorded at Drop of Sun in Asheville, North Carolina, with Bleeds producer Alex Farrar. MJ Lenderman, Xandy Chelmis, and Landon George drop in for assists, as well as Meg Duffy and Ross’ longtime collaborator Dan Keegan. It’s not as immediately grabby as Dulling the Horns, but a broader palette gives Still Coming Down its own small, distinct pleasures: Melancholy pedal steel and what I can only describe as a Vampire Weekend-y interlude on “Like Water”; a sweetie, some-DJ-should-sample-this clarinet riff on “Dead for a Sec”; wailing fiddle on the title track. The bones of the songs remain very Wild Pink: like War on Drugs, kind of, but every guitar is overdriven to shit. Ross doesn’t tend towards punch-the-air climaxes—just warm, excitable builds.
Ross’ music eschews the cathartic function of a lot of classic heartland rock, maybe because his lyric-writing is fairly literary and terse. The way he extrapolates from mundane images suggests that he would be a great essayist, or writer of greeting cards: On “Still Coming Down,” he sings about cutting someone off in traffic, and admits that “you didn’t need to let me through.” A more solipsistic songwriter might use that image to look inward, interrogate what that action says about oneself. Instead, Ross comes to a conclusion from the other driver’s small act of kindness: “You got a compass right where your heart is, you know what to do.”
