By the looks of Casual Sects’ name, album title and album art, you might expect this album to be a joke. However, this local garage-rock trio puts some serious songwriting and instrumentation down over high, functioning’s 20-minute runtime.
Vocalist, guitarist and lyricist J. Tyler Brunson, bassist and backing vocalist Joshua Echlin and drummer J. Alexander Cunningham combine ’60s pop-rock melodies, ’90s angst and lo-fi recording for a roaring debut outing. To attempt to explain what makes this record so memorable, the trio is not afraid into dig into personal lyrical content, but they’re not so caught up in making their point that the melodies and hooks suffer as a result.
The band tackles topics like grief (“The Mourning Cometh”), coping (“Kicking Bucket City”), and addiction (“The Itch”) like they’re hiding behind a smile. They’re telling these personal accounts with straightforward purpose, but don’t want you to get bogged down by the bleak. It’s as if they’re saying, “Yeah, life sucks sometimes, but we’ve still gotta make some kick-ass rock ’n’ roll.”
They do this by boiling down thoughts and themes into simple mantras present in the choruses. Expressions like I think it’s all bad news and It could be true what they say carry the point across while providing punchy hooks.
There are also a few points at which Casual Sects breaks this mold. “Ready?” alludes to a dark situation while Brunson fumes with frustration, often jamming lyrics into a less traditional structure. On the other hand, “Clingy” leans hard into a conventional love song trope for a so-repetitive-it’s-catchy number about infatuation. “Sabbath,” also centered around a love theme, is a simple rocker that features lyrics about breaking up/making up and squeezes in some riff-filled breakdowns.
All these varying approaches meld into a fuzzy, lo-fi EP that is well worth your time if you’re into modern acts like Wavves, Ty Segall and Diarrhea Planet. While it may not be the first of its kind, it is surely worth ranking Casual Sects among Middle Tennessee’s most promising acts in the genre.
Casual Sects’ high, functioning is available on Bandcamp.
