Music Review: Saints & Liars, ‘These Times’
Seasoned Vermont roots band delivers an album loaded up with foot-stomping roadhouse-tested originals and a few softer, mellower surprises.
Saints & Liars album artwork
Of all the music pros impacted by the pandemic, none were hit harder than those whose entire career is built on performing live. Case in point: Saints & Liars, who’ve been around since 2012 but had never made a full album of the original songs they’ve written—and performed hundreds of times—since their inception, having focused almost entirely on regional touring in Vermont and the Northeast.
Then, the pandemic. (Every single one of us alive in 2020 has that line in our biographies now.) Their everyday grind ground to a halt, as it did for so many others. Eventually, the live music circuit veterans, dubbed “Vermont’s Roadhouse Roots Band,” decided to use the forced break as an opportunity to record a long-overdue studio album.
Saints & Liars. Photo courtesy of the artists.
These Times is a mix of those roadhouse-tested songs written over the past five years as well as a few quarantine-penned new ones. I have an idea which is which—most of the songs are bar-friendly uptempo foot stompers, anchored by the gravelly bellow of Jed Hughes’s well-traveled voice, which is clearly acclimated to roaring above the din of boisterous crowds at bars and festivals. The first line of the album, “People ask me why are you so quiet,” seems like deliberate irony given the way it’s delivered. Backed by Chris Rogers on bass, drummer Nolan Rolnick and Mike Farkas, who can coax a pedal-steel whine out of his resonator guitar, most of the songs are delivered at a breakneck pace.
But there are a few slightly softer songs with contemplative lyrics, and Hughes occasionally surprises with a mellower, smoother delivery. While I can see how the bigger, louder songs would be a lot of fun at a live show, I appreciated the laid-back pace and simpler instrumentation of the title track and “Be Here Be Now.”
Saints & Liars. Photo courtesy of the artists.
Many of the other songs are such good party music, it took a second listen to realize that there’s not as much partying in the lyrics as you’d think. “Ain’t it funny how time moves slow / when you take time to live in full?” begins “Garden Song.” Of course they still deliver a number of drinking songs, including “High Life” (named after the champagne of beers, naturally). But even those tracks contain more thoughtful lyrics than I expected: In “Drunk and Not Alone,” Hughes sings, “It’ll be years before I’m comfortable in my skin / who knows, that day may never come.”
These Times is a great introduction to a band you might not have otherwise encountered if you live outside of the Manchester area of Vermont, and it will allow fans who do get to see them at one of their many shows (that schedule is full-up again now that lockdown is over) to take a piece of Saints & Liars home—and maybe appreciate their songwriting a little more fully.
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!
