Beginning life as the solo project of songwriter Catherine Conley, Boston’s Little Musket has evolved into a full band, developing Conley’s early demos into brilliant, clattering slices of fully-fledged garage rock. The result is Fever Blister, the debut Little Musket record that is being released later this week with Dadstache Records, and we’re delighted to share a stream a few days early.
Fever Blister is a frustrated album, occupying a grouchy, sleep-deprived headspace where every little nuisance rubs you up the wrong way. The tone is set from opener ‘Dolly Parton’, a track that emerges from the throes of a teeth-aching hangover and imagines an escape from the realities of existence. “Sunday morning, wake up,” Conley sings over racing grunge guitars “I take off all my make-up / from the night before / and I am so hungover.” The blend of exhaustion and regret and the inescapable, cyclical nature of the habit has her turning for fantasy. “At times like this I could really use a friend,” she declares, “at times like this I think again and again and again and again, I wish I was Dolly Parton.”
Droll self-deprecation aside, the track could be viewed as a deeper dive, the hangover standing in for the mildly toxic experience of life itself, Dolly Parton the unachievable image of success. Viewed this way, the frustration of the song does not instigate the dreams of escape but vice versa, the unending tension between how we’ve been told life should be and how it actually turns out.
The idea is woven through Little’s Musket’s music. ‘Home for The Summer’ explores the dead months of the year, boredom crushing down as the collegiate fantasy is suspended until September, while the title track favours a brooding discontent. Here exasperation is stretched from one day to the next, repressed feelings gathering in an internal storm, a humidity that builds and builds until precipitating in the screamed release of the rambunctious closing minutes.
Highlighting the elasticity of Conley’s vocals, ‘Burn Out’ finds her more gentle and reflective until the chorus bursts in with a clear-eyed ferocity, and closer ‘Stoney Baloney’ shakes from sluggish beginnings into a nostalgic weave of regret and longing. Both tracks, and indeed the whole album, are conjured from the liminal space between hopes and reality—the inability to let go of what has been and might be causing the present to be a little greyer, a little more boring than anyone would wish. Fever Blister is a railing against this feeling, not with some self-help spurt of positivity but rather good old fashioned anger.
Why not join Little Musket and embrace your moody mindset? Take the plunge below: