It flips my wig that a band like Oh Boland exists in Dublin, Ireland, of all places. Like... how? How in the world does a band that sounds like this exist outside of the American rust-belt!?! I swear they sound like a more perfect version of about half a dozen bands that I would see every summer during college when they would haul their gear and sweaty broken bodies up from St. Louis, Indianapolis, or DeKalb, to play a dive or bowling alley up in my neck of Wisconsin, celebrating with me and possible half a dozen other lushes, the decline of western civilization, one riff, and one PBR tall-boy at a time. I guess the catalogs of Neil Young and Alex Chilton really do translate into a kind of sonic esperanto, because those are the playbooks that bandleader Niall Murphy is working off of on this third LP Western Leisure, and it was more or less the script that the bands which Oh Boland reminds me of were working from as well (give or take a wink and nod to the Boss and/or Creatures of the Night). Intriguingly, an adherence to past-its-prime, country-pop, and rock Americana of the late-20s century doesn't bog the album down in the mire of nostalgia or find it tumbling into the trap of a sentimental torpor. Instead, there is a brisk and canny sense of irony about the music and its lumpenized, downwardly mobile subjects that keeps the entire affair feeling florid and rejuvenated, with a purpose of focus that conspicuously folds the past into an overpass under which one can glimpse the gleaming ray of one's fortune and future (or depending on your luck, the headlights of an onrushing semi-trailer [hey, it's still your future... but maybe just flatter than you expected]). Listening to Western Leisure produces for me the compelling stereoptical portrait of the band cruising in an open convertible down a backcountry dirt road somewhere in the American heartland, with Niall on the hood with his guitar, leaning into the wind and angling his body on the metallic buffalo's stealy bonnet like it was a surfboard cutting into curl of an approaching wave, the background reeling past them like it was rolling backdrop of a movie-set as they seek out the famed corn mazes of El Dorado, or practice auditioning for a yet to be announced sequel to David Byrne's True Stories. Oh Boland are people like us, only they picked up the phone when the American Dream called, and now they're on a debauched adventure and gratifying, suicide slide through bat country in the hopes of squeezing out all the zest that Western Leisure has to offer.
