Music Review: Mark Ross & the Three-Nineteen, ‘The Unreal Deal’
The southern Minnesota band’s debut album delivers punchy, story-driven Americana alt-rock.
Mark Ross & the Three-Nineteen’s The Unreal Deal album artwork, 2021.
Hailing from Northfield, Minnesota, Mark Ross is a singer-songwriter who crafts the kind of hooky, radio-ready songs I used to hear in the 1990s on the alternative station. That was my first impression when I started playing his band’s May 2021 debut album, The Unreal Deal, and heard the opening notes of “Drive Thru.” It opens with a burst of drums and an electric guitar line that took me right back to that era. (Being a Gen-Xer, it had me nodding along in nostalgic pleasure.)
But then, about 15 seconds in, the guitar took a break and its melodious line was picked up by a fiddle, and it gave the song a whole new feel—a more Americana, country-rock sound. I realized this wasn’t going to be “just” a throwback 1990s alt-rock album—though that’s a strong influence throughout. Mark Ross & the Three-Nineteen—a solid, synced-up six-piece outfit—are doing their own thing, at an intersection in Americana-land where alt rock meets country. Son Volt has traveled that road pretty recently. Jason Isbell might’ve been seen in the vicinity.
As I kept listening, I got the feeling (bolstered by reading his press release about the record) that Ross was exploring a theme of relationship tension and transience. Lyrics throughout the songs speak of being stuck, of restlessness, of taking chances, of debating whether to just run away. There’s just enough ambiguity in each track that you can take what you want away from them—but just enough specificity to create imagery in your mind, a sense of place and emotion.
Driving rhythms easily propel the listener along, contrasting with that wistful fiddle and bittersweet lyrics, given an extra touch of pathos by Ross’s vocals, which finish off most lines with an appealing vibrato quaver. It’s the kind of music you can just let carry you along your way, or you can dive into the lyrics, enjoying their metaphorical twists or trying to tease out their deeper meaning.
Photo courtesy of the artist website.
In “Drive Thru,” that alternating electric guitar and fiddle line is the star of the show for me. The two instruments take turns soloing like a call and response between 90s alt-rock and country music as the lyrics seem to paint a picture of a life or relationship that’s started to go in circles: “Is this what we call home? / Slipping night after night, walking around til everything’s closed / Is this all we got left? / Did we run out of gas or did we just run out of sense?”
The next track, “Hurricane,” starts with acoustic guitar and fiddle over the drums, soon joined by a woman’s voice like a siren song that winds in and out of the song, sometimes joining Ross with harmony, other times soaring away from him. It’s no surprise, then, that this song’s about a woman whose captivating impact is quite treacherous to the narrator: “She comes in like a hurricane, another situation that I found myself drowning in before.” (Beware: This song’s extremely earwormy chorus will get stuck in your head all day after a single listen!)
“Run” has more of a straight-up alt-rock feel (although that fiddle still gives it an interesting texture) and seems to tell of an imperfect relationship that’s not in a good place (“Seems like everything we stole, we gave away / Took a little bit of everything / Learned a lot of nothing new”) but still has some hope for change: “Hey you, why don’t you run away with me? / Hey you, break those roots and be set free.”
The country feel comes back for “Ghosts,” and even Ross’s vocal delivery seems to take on more of a twang, though it might just be the cadence of the song that has me thinking that. The lyrics are evocative yet mysterious, and every time I listen I have a different theory about what’s going on. Right now they’re telling me the story of long-parted lovers who are considering a new start with one another (“Maybe this time it’s for real”), while worrying that the ghosts of their past together might be too much to get over (“It’s all lies, tiny tragedies that leave us on this open road dancing with our ghosts.”)
Photo courtesy of the artist website.
“She’s Coming Home” opens with an irresistibly hooky electric guitar riff that reminded me a bit of the way “Sweet Child of Mine” by Guns ‘n’ Roses starts out. A nameless woman roams the country from New Mexico to Colorado, either running away from or going to confront things in her past she’s never dealt with before: “Sleepin’ underneath the Colorado sky / Watch the fire burn mountains through the night / Knowing she had debts to pay / Some things don’t go away.” It’s fun to imagine what it could be she’s wrestling with, but it’s also fun to just relax and let that electric guitar soar in your ears.
“Love Comes Easy” might be the closest thing to a ballad on this uptempo record; it’s a little more easygoing, and it’s the only one with harmonies sung on nearly every line (possibly by that siren from “Hurricane”). The lyrics use an extended metaphor of the lovers being characters on the movie screen, scrutinized and defined by people watching them: “Blinded by the spotlight on us / Looks like everybody wants to know / What’s behind the silhouette / Shadows tell them something they don’t know.” Again, the meaning is ambiguous enough that you could put a dozen spins on the song, but my takeaway is that people tend to simplify love when they see it from the outside, when it’s always more complicated in actuality: “Love comes easy / the rest of it is anybody’s guess.”
The track that closes out the album, “Midnight Rain,” picks up the pace again. Though I couldn’t make out many of the lyrics, it seems to tell another story of someone on a “long lonely ride” to or from something, “running scared and all alone.” The driving rhythm and wandering fiddle leave you with a sense of momentum and being on the move, however directionless the journey may be—I could see this being a great song for a road trip mix.
It’s a great capper for The Unreal Deal, which has such a breezy momentum I assumed these were two- and three-minute songs; I was genuinely surprised when I noted they were all in the three- to five-minute range. Mark Ross & the Three-Nineteen have put together a nifty set of hooky Americana songs that are pure fun to listen to even as the lyrics slyly slip away from any definitive interpretation.
Carol Roth. Photo credit: Dan Lee.
Carol Roth is a full-time marketing copywriter and the main music journalist and social media publicist for Adventures in Americana. In addition to studying the guitar and songwriting, Carol’s additional creative side hustle is writing self-proclaimed “trashy” novels under the pseudonym @taberkeley!
