Filthy Friends - Emerald Valley

Filthy Friends proved themselves a real band on their debut, and Emerald Valley confirms it emphatically. The second album from Corin Tucker, Peter Buck, Kurt Bloch, Scott McCaughey, and new drummer Linda Pitmon is bigger, angrier, and more cohesive than Invitation, a record that feels less like a one-off collaboration and more like the work of a unit that has found its voice and has urgent things to say with it.

The album takes its name from a nickname for Tucker's home city of Eugene, Oregon, and the title track traces a quietly devastating arc from idyllic pastoral imagery through the arrival of settlers, developers, and the slow erosion of the land and the people who work it. From there, Emerald Valley fans out into a fully realized protest record, addressing oil pipelines and environmental destruction on "Pipeline" and "The Elliott," gentrification and income inequality on "One Flew East," the family separation policy on "Angels," and the political moment writ large on the slow-burning, dread-soaked "November Man," where Buck's guitar screams like a plane taking off while Tucker delivers some of the most dramatically controlled singing of her career.

The music matches the weight of its subjects. Buck, Bloch, and Tucker make for a formidable guitar combination, all buzz and jangle and controlled fury, while McCaughey and Pitmon hold the foundation steady without ever fighting the songs. "Last Chance County" is a full-on punk anthem of anxious hopelessness that sounds like Patti Smith in a very bad mood, while the acoustic closer "Hey Lacey" provides a moment of wounded tenderness that earns every second. As one critic noted, Tucker and Buck have never sounded more like a genuine songwriting partnership than they do here.