All Set The Bone — Greg Freeman

All Set The Bone — Greg Freeman

All Set The Bone, the third full-length effort from Vermont-based songwriter Greg Freeman, glides past like a series of gradually illuminated wastelands out the car window on a 13-hour drive. It is the dawn-tinged skies of Reno, Nevada as you make the descent out of the Carson Range Foothills, the low-lit parking lots of nowhere, Nebraska as you scrape food out of a styrofoam container, the pre-midnight ramblings of a neon-scrawled, New England bar just as you’re starting to catch a buzz—the containment and exploration of what it means to be and, more importantly, to feel lost on an American continent where nobody, frankly, seems to give a shit.

If all of that seems oblique, it’s because Freeman’s painting of this portrait deliberately takes on that demeanor.

Freeman has one of the most disconcerting, and yet hauntingly pleasant, voices among this modern crop of indie-twang songwriters. His discography, to this point, has been a steady project of learning to truly harness that sound. 

We get different expressions of that across the length of All Set The Bone. Tracks like “Cahokia”, “Loser’s Prize”, and the cascading closer “Bury Me The Shovel” all take on the complexion of pure alt-country—with pedal-steel glidings and even a healthy smattering of banjo pickings setting the canvas upon which Freeman’s voice splatters, at turns, like a Pollock painting. On a song like “Culture”, though, we see some post-rock influenced, Slint-like aggression and desperation start to seep out across its stuttered guitar strumming and stumbling melodies. On more straightforward tracks like ”Indu” and “Hail Mary,” those same vocal motifs are conveyed, instead, over more saccharine guitar tones and more direct rhythms.

But if there’s one adjective that can be used to describe the instrumentation on this project, it’s driven. The drumming, done largely by session musician Joey Sullivan, is incredible at every turn. While Freeman’s voice has a distinctly disarming, expressive strength and range, it doesn’t quite have the carrying or the staying power that his instrumentals provide on this project—and a large chunk of the legwork there is taken on by the rhythm section.

That’s not a critique, though—at least not in the traditional sense. A strong songwriter is able to recognize and work within those restraints, and Freeman, on All Set The Bone, puts forward as striking a pictorial and narrative effort as I can recall in recent memory.

His narratives are, seemingly intentionally, difficult to parse out—he operates more in broad, impressionistic strokes, rooted in a concrete setting but abstracted to the threshold of recognition. On “Totaled,” we see the narrator in a junkyard or a salvage yard, gazing with a palpable mixture of dread and remorse at the piles of disfigured vehicles. On “Costs,” we see flashes of a bar scene 

But while almost all of the tracks across All Set The Bone are located somewhere, Freeman’s lyrics never get specific enough for the listener to nail down a fully-formed picture in their mind. It’s instead the grand, ever-shifting totality that’s easiest to apprehend, and the strength of the overarching impression is Freeman’s greatest credit as a songwriter.

Here’s some lyrics I collected that, while scattered, can at least start to represent that throughline:

“In the morgue of mechanical failure

I felt nothing but a dull kind of relief

That's where she left for the far side of forever

That's where his body turned to ground beef” (Totaled)

“All that happiness

Is now scraping out my cells

Like a brick thrown in the dryer” (Withdrawn)

“In the desert of my bed, they're gonna find my bones

And on the dunes of my pillow, a saguaro for a headstone” (Indu)

“Hear the Christian hearts clank around

Like lobsters in its trap” (Loser’s Prize)

“On an office floor in Maryland

Baby I was born in the lion’s den

With a loose leaf head and a ball point pen

To call my only friends” (Costs)

“Looking down from your hotel room

Like a ghost behind its tomb

Barricades and navy blue

It all made you feel confused” (Hail Mary)

“Whatever you're scared to lose

I promise there was nothing coming anyway” (Decade)

“Well are you obviously swimming in that gown

If I can't find your hill to die on then I guess that I'll just drown” (Marooned)

“Down below the paving stones the beach has turned to glass

And everybody who’s come to party is now a bug in an amber cast” (Untitled 10)

“They’ll stick you in the dog food factory

With a mouth full of teeth like piano keys

Working for a man you will never ever see” (Next To Nothing)

It’s not just the unsharpened focus of each of Freeman’s images that bring the project to its summit, though. It’s the arrangement of these images, and the sounds that populate the album’s various expressions, that lend All Set The Bone its impact. Tracks and depictions lap against each other like the wine-dark waves of converging seas; no individual wasteland is fully distinct from its descendant and predecessor, and perhaps that’s part of the point.

Across the project, Freeman seems to reckon with a sense of apathy—in his own art, in the loosely-defined characters that populate his narratives, and in the settings themselves. The lines between narrative spurts are blurred, are at times even erased entirely, as we’re shuffled through a confluence of seemingly loosely-connected images, of quiet suffering, open skies, minimum-wage exploitation, gravel roads, lithographed T-shirts, stained movie theater carpets, splintered wood peeling off an old electrical pole.

It’s not a work that’s devoid of hope, and it’s certainly not an abstract reimagining of a singular narrative theme. On All Set The Bone, Freeman straddles an almost uncannily perfect line. The details of his images and his stories remain just unfocused enough to resist the temptation to get caught up in dissecting them, but everything else collides into enough of a cohesive form to make the whole thing distinctly, and bitingly, intelligible.