Swingin’ Utters is a band that has always managed to avoid the sometimes-ghetto that is modern punk rock. The band has never sat still, shifting its sonic focus from record to record. The band’s past two efforts, Here, Under Protest and Poorly Formed, saw a tightening of focus. The former coiled the band’s street punk fury into a tense, volatile set, while the latter sweetened that approach with sunburst, power pop leanings.
Fistful of Hollow, the band’s great new record, doesn’t exactly follow suit. Instead, it hearkens back, at least in part, to the band’s 2003 record, Dead Flowers, Bottles, Bluegrass, and Bones. That record, one of the finest in recent memory from any band on Fat Wreck Chords, was Swingin’ Utters most committed and honest attempt to mine several different traditions, breaking from punk to explore folk, country, Celtic music, and various pop tangents. Make no mistake, Fistful of Hollow doesn’t retread the ground laid on that record, but instead offers a new path through these genres and, yet again, renders the band’s sound fresh and explosive.
“Alice” and “Fistful of Hollow” lead the album off and present two clear sides to its sound. The first is a blistering punk number, full of rumbling drums, slicing guitars and, of course, Johnny Bonnel’s bristling howl. “Fistful of Hollow” maintains that song’s speedy propulsion, but it trades gang vocals for sweet hooks and lacerating guitars for warm beds of distortion. It’s got an immediate punk punch, but it’s catchy in a deeper way. The guitar solo feels just dusty enough, as if it borrows from the sound of pedal steels without dipping full on into country twang.
The album is full of those small kinds of explorations within seemingly straightforward songs. “Napalm Sound” clears out the layers, and jangling guitars glide over pared down percussion. The song draws a line between pop punk and the playful pop of folks like Elvis Costello. “I’m Not Coming Home” is as much a driving rock song as it is — in its deepest corners — a reverbed, ’50s-pop tune. There are more obvious shifts on songs like the acoustic “Spanish”, haunted on its edges by distant Brit pop guitar fills. There’s also the banjo-heavy closer “End of the Weak” that puts so many bluegrass-punk hybrid songs to shame because it doesn’t try to be either. It’s simply a sweet, catchy tune that happens to be formed around the banjo. It’s an intimate turn for an album that tends to kick up dust more than it brushes it off.
The remarkable thing about Fistful of Hollow, though, is how well these shifts cohere. Dead Flowers, Bottles, Bluegrass, and Bones was an album of island hopping. The links weren’t always there, and the jarring shifts worked. On Fistful of Hollow, you can hear the extra decade-plus of work under Swingin’ Utters’ belt, as the genre shifts are subtler, both within songs and from track to track. So you can see how the straight-up infectious punk of “From the Towers to the Tenaments” links to “Napalm Sound”, or how “Spanish” sets us up for the rattling underpinnings of “Tibetan Book of the Damned”. From song to song, Swingin’ Utters both surprises and reassures on this record. The band proves there’s plenty of mileage in its sound, and plenty of territory yet uncharted. Despite that, the catchy energy of these songs, something we’ve come to expect from these guys, is a welcome comfort.