For more than half a decade, singer-guitarist Sean Raasch and drummer Tyler Nelson played together in Jackraasch, a local group that specialized in the kind of bread-and-butter, guitar-based indie-rock that, as their bad luck would have it, just happened to be falling out of vogue in the late ’00s. It’s a story many musicians can relate to: For whatever reason, the group never took off the way they hoped, and even the audience they did capture eventually began to lose interest. As the duo fizzled out, they went through something Raasch can only describe as “a mid-band crisis.” They rechristened themselves Crazy Fox & Baby Cowboy and began playing twangy, ridiculous country music.
Needless to say, the public didn’t take to Crazy Fox & Baby Cowboy, but at least Raasch emerged wiser for the experience. “After the slide-guitar fiasco, I realized that I really needed to go back to square one, and just write real songs with normal chords and try to put my heart into it,” he says. That simple mindset, and the addition of bassist/multi-instrumentalist Lodewijk Broekhuizen, laid the groundwork for their new, more considered group, Twin Brother.
Last year Twin Brother released a self-titled album that filtered the twisty, thick-flanneled indie-rock Jackraasch used to specialize in through the prism of folk music, but it’s the group’s new Swallow the Anchor that feels like a true reinvention. It’s a lean, gimmick-free folk-rock album, striking for both its confidence and sustained, understated mood. Raasch calls it his “old man record,” a description that’s as apt as any for the way the record luxuriates in the present, without fixating on the foibles of the past. First and foremost, it’s an album about acceptance.
Don’t get me wrong; there are negative thoughts on the album,” Raasch says. “A lot of the album is about wanting to give up a lot of things in my life, but it’s also about coming to terms with that. The title Swallow The Anchor comes from an old sailor’s term for retiring the sea life and giving up. It was my term for the music, I guess. In my mind I drew a picture of a guy swallowing an anchor and when I looked at it, the anchor was four times the size of the guy’s head, so it would be physically impossible. And I thought, ‘That’s true. That’s how I feel: I want to swallow the anchor, but it’s not possible. Although I acknowledge the idea that I want to give up, I can’t.’”
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Those sentiments will resonate particularly with any artist who has ever tried to make an improbable living off of their craft, but relating to them isn’t a prerequisite for enjoying the album’s easy, lived-in vibe. For all the toil and compromise Raasch outlines in these songs, they never feel jaded or strained, and they never try to pass their burdens down to the listener. It’s an album for kicking back with at the end of the long day, with the earthy, muted arrangements that occasionally shade these songs—some soulful horns on a few tracks; a splash of violin here and there—serving as a soothing digestif.
“For the most part it’s a pretty simple album,” Raasch says. “We kept the songs pretty stripped down. We didn’t add much to the songs because we didn’t need to add much to them. I like to think when you write good songs you don’t need to add a bunch of bells and whistles to them. And I was trying to believe with all my heart that these were good songs.”
Swallow the Anchor is streaming on Twin Brother’s Bandcamp page. Twin Brother plays Hotel Foster on Sunday, Sept. 28 with Ladders, The New Red Moons and The Calamity Janes as part of the Milwaukee Film Festival’s post-screening concert series.
