Greg Freeman (16 and Over)

About this event

Greg Freeman won’t be getting comfortable anytime soon. Across New Mexico, Vermont, Los Angeles, and a long stretch of tour stops hooking those places together, All Set The Bone came alive. While writing and recording it, Freeman moved out of his longtime home in Burlington, holed up in a middle-of-nowhere part of the Southwest, and stepped into music full-time, leaving behind odd jobs as a cemetery landscaper and restaurant line cook. The following album is populated by a grain of similarly unsettled people: a voter buried in credit card debt, a pair of Christian hearts clanking like trapped lobsters, a town of bent necks, a lover with limbs bent like crabapple trees. Freeman calls All Set The Bone a “reflection of a lot of change, and a lot of tension.” It’s a box of political and personal yarns spread across four sides, “inhuman events” and grief pulled into a “perfect tsunami.” Freeman was barely done making Burnover when he started writing its successor. He chased disruptions with confidence, creating on impulse rather than familiarity. “I had this epiphany moment where I understood what the next record should be,” he says, “which surprised me, because I thought it would take a lot longer to have the influences or inspiration required to undertake writing a new album.” What arrived instead were radioactive songs that never seemed overworked or moralizing. There may as well have been a “no overthinking” sign pasted above the studio door. Traces of pre-Good News Modest Mouse and early Pavement linger, but All Set The Bone resists easy lineage through a deliberate fracture that’s twisting yet familiar. Freeman’s longtime obsessions with Fugazi and Unwound color the album’s heavier dirges—like “Hail Mary”’s math-rock chords snapping against post-hardcore distortion—and its spangled outposts grew from a diet of Big Star, The Drones, and Mission of Burma. The best parts of All Set The Bone blink like psychotic blues ramp-ups, while the heavy-metal/weeping violin…