Red Collar – Welcome Home

Two albums into his latest project, Jason Kutchma of Red Collar has built his young group an outsized following that made the online stream of Welcome Home a major event among this season’s releases. Welcome Home is generally a match for its audience, occasionally straining to meet its lyrical ambitions while providing a strong, thoughtful collection that round out the album’s titular theme.

“Orphanage” sets the tone for the album with the kind of bare-bones, guitar-driven hooks that with the help of a generous production effort provide refreshing complexity to a style characterized by other releases this year as simple and undeveloped. Its Southern influence nests it firmly in the hierarchy of this year’sLucero and Hot Water Music releases, and blends in surprisingly well with those other cheerfully sentimental works.

Its weaker tracks are relentlessly narrative while lacking captivating lyricism, with one too many undeveloped stories about ‘small-town life’ to prevent the natural tendency for eye-rolling such fare can induce. I’ll admit as I listened I misplaced the group as being from Jersey, as the thinner tracks like “Old Piano Roll” and “Two Daughters” listen like a poor-man’s Gaslight Anthem.

Elsewhere the focus is on the bigger picture, and as the album pulls back to explore Kutchma’s ideas about the eternal “never going home” concept it becomes more rich melodically and compelling lyrically. “Fade Into The Night” and “This House” will be the album’s longest-lasting tracks and are the biggest breakthroughs for the band’s sound. Elsewhere overwrought backups detract from soulful guitar work, as part of the delicate balancing act between insincere and maudlin Red Collar’s style must practice.

The album’s final and titular track brings home themes explored across the album, providing a sense of closure to an album whose biggest and best ideas seemed to demand irresolution as augured by the slow, almost reluctant fades of many of the previous tracks. These are quibbles metaphysical with a great album that exceeds expectations and raises the bar for Red Collar. The formula repeated across this album’s tracks will work just fine for future works, but hopefully with an established reputation with a producer that gives them room for more ambitious instrumentation and experimentation Red Collar can become great.