By Phillipe Roberts
Deadlines aren’t sexy, but they sure get things done. If you’re reading this, you’ve likely had dozens of artist friends who’ve taken on a “write a song a day” challenge, fought tooth-and-nail to hold themselves to the grind of Inktober, or ground down the keys on their laptop for National Novel Writing Month. Though our bodies and minds chafe at the idea of taming our creative impulses those seemingly artificial constraints can produce some wildly organic results.
Reigning in their substantial creative powers and assembling a cast of all-star DIY collaborators, Baseball Gregg did the damn thing and put out a single every month of 2019. Now assembled into the appropriately named album Calendar, the singles surprisingly coalesce into a fun, satisfying whole that miraculously avoids sounding haphazard and disconnected. Instead, it threads seasonal obsessions and changing moods through with the band’s expert command of winking indie pop sincerity and gift for peppy hook-writing.
Baseball Gregg gently glides across a spectrum of genres - surf, rock, even feather-light R&B–but generally sits in a more grounded version of early aughts indie pop kings The Unicorns, mixed with the bedroom psych of Brooklyn upstarts Crumb. Colorful album opener “Toursong” lays out the palette that Baseball Gregg works across Calendar–bright, beach-ready guitars, whispered voices piling on top of one another, and no-frills, groove-forward drumming conducive to solo dancing in your room or softly bopping around to at the front of an outdoor concert. An ode to friendship on the road, its bubbly heart-on-sleeve nostalgia feels almost religious in its faithful lack of cynicism, and carries through into “Waiting”s slow-hand phaser solo strut. The optimism is so infectious and hits so suddenly that, if your head wasn’t already nodding, you might think Baseball Gregg is deflecting from some hidden inner darkness.
Thankfully, the floor never quite disappears from under you; anywhere the album gestures towards grim reality, the band assert, forcefully, that there’s nothing but love at the heart of it. Even death isn’t safe from a rose-colored re-evaluation on “Gratitude”, where we’re urged to chalk the transition into unconsciousness (or whatever else awaits) up to having the “best dream you’ve ever had”, as placid acoustic guitars and watery synths weave a cozy hammock of sounds from which you’ll gladly doze off into the hereafter. Warbling keyboards and goofy guitar turnarounds subvert the creeping dread of poorly-managed mental illness on “Pleasure and Pain.” The frank discussion of packing a bowl when you know that “this much weed / it’s not good for me” and the numbing effect that self-medication leaves you with is somehow made more effective by keeping it to these diaristic snippets of epiphanies on the journey. Existential dread doesn’t need to be so heavy all the time, and Calendar is better off for its levity.
Guest stars make a huge impact on Calendar. For all of Luca Lovisetto and Sam Regan’s expert songcraft, the album’s undeniable highlight is “The Movies,” featuring prominent lead vocals from Brooklyn’s own Pecas. Played against a delightfully jazzy solo from William Corduroy, her intimate innocence in connecting a beautiful first date to a lifetime of bliss through breathy, utterly dreamy vocals makes it feel almost criminal that it’s the album’s second shortest song. Similarly, a knockout saxophone feature from Jacopo Finelli kicks album closer “Never Bored” well past its almost blindingly on-the-nose use of the unstoppable Young Folks-esque whistle hook, and gives you something concrete to hold onto as the album itself slips off into the distance.
In a twist of fate, Calendar is less a time-capsule documentation of specific emotions and times, and more of a playlist of sturdy indie pop hits that can stand the test of time. Baseball Gregg and their deep bench of featured artists are onto something here. Unlike its namesake, don’t throw this one away after just one year; slide the dates to the right, rewind, and connect the dots.
Check out Baseball Gregg on their Bandcamp.