ALBUM REVIEW: On ‘You Can’t Tell Me I’m Not What I Used To Be’ Massy Ferguson Steps Up

If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. There will always be a place for Americana bar bands, bands that faithfully serve up that magical combination of melancholy and dogged determinism that feels most at home in small basement venues. After twenty years, Massy Ferguson perfected their version of the formula – but sometimes competency leads to complacency, and the band shook itself out of that on their latest, You Can’t Tell Me I’m Not What I Used To Be.

The band kicks the album off with the song that broke them out of their groove, “So Long Carry On.” It’s a meditative crooner that was born from a few idle chords during soundcheck. The song’s looping structure sets the tone for a record that looks to the past, casts a dim eye on the present, but yearns for a brighter future – somehow. Even as the song bids farewell to the people who float away from us, it’s imbued with a quiet hope for something more. Massy Ferguson seems to want us to understand the value of quiet moments of contemplation, even among chaos.

But they kick it into gear immediately after with “When You’re Not Around,” a bar rock stomper that knows the value of ditching drudgery for a good time, and celebrating who we are when we’re not chained to our day jobs. “You Were So High,” a gauzy, Tom Petty-esque admiration of an adventurous older sister similarly feels like a timeless anthem. Truly, Massy Ferguson have such a knack for translating their role models like the Replacements and Springsteen into their own voices that lyrics that references to smartphones and “spilling the tea” feel jarring.

To that end, songs like “Headlights Highbeams” and “Shrunken Head” are beautiful infusions of country and their hometown of Seattle’s major exports: grunge. If anything, it’s that tension between the city’s tech center aspirations and its rural surroundings that give the band its voice. But they also experiment: “Lights Get Low” is a synth-infused ode to the beauty and squalor of rock’n’roll, while the album’s closer, “Lovely Lad” is a power pop-influenced piano ballad yearning for childhood innocence. 

There’s nothing fancy on You Can’t Tell Me I’m Not What I Used To Be, but that’s the point. Massy Ferguson have proven to themselves that they can be more than a bar rock band and it doesn’t require a complete reinvention, just some attention to details and imagining something for themselves beyond what they thought possible.

Massy Ferguson’s You Can’t Tell Me I’m Not What I Used To Be is out Feb. 7.