“I know our aim is true,” Jared Hart crows on album opener “Young Dionysians.”
It’s hard not to take him at his word. The Quarry, the debut album of Mercy Union—a Jersey City group composed of members of the Gaslight Anthem and the Scandals—bursts out of the gate on the energy in that line, and never really let up. It’s a raspy, cocky album, with jagged, jangling guitars and insistent drums defining their ramshackle garage-rock sound, irreverent in its gaze, but still nostalgic. It helps that this sound already has a shape in music history: the edged anxiety of “Chips and Vics” and the ballad-like harmonica longing of “Layovers” sound like the best version of the band that never made it out of your hometown.
But The Quarry tells a story in two timelines at once and buckles a bit under its own contradiction. Mercy Union wants to voice the melancholic adult looking back on the suburbs and the scrappy, aimless kid still fighting to get out. The temptation to lean on the latter, to produce another record of angry small-town kids pulling every note they can out of secondhand instruments, is all over this album, to the point where The Quarry runs the risk of sounding like one long song you’ve heard before. But for what it’s worth, Mercy Union manages to provide further depth to this story, layering an introspective sadness over suburban ennui. The Quarry lasts as long as it’s wanted but certainly wouldn’t turn down another invitation.
The Quarry
Matthew Apadula is a writer and music critic from New York. His work has previously appeared on GIGsoup Music and in Drunk in a Midnight Choir.
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