It’s possible to describe Mortgage Freeman’s sophomore album Streetcrusher in a single word: busy. Using one word to describe an album this bountiful, however, almost feels like an insult, since brevity has nothing to do with this record’s prog-addled vision. So instead let’s describe Streetcrusher as an audaciously manic, supersized, seam-bursting loaded baked potato of a record, an hour-long spectacle that crams so many voices, plots and twists into each song that it feels like a quadruple album that’s been compressed in a pressure cooker. It’s also a fundamentally zany album, and occasionally its nods to Rush, King Crimson and the like boarder on Weird Al-style genre parody territory, making it easy to lump Mortgage Freeman with the many other bands in the Milwaukee music scene that sometimes seem more interested in messing around than in writing serious songs. Ultimately, Mortgage Freeman aren’t mocking prog-rock—they’re celebrating it, and Streetcrusher is at its heart a love letter to the genre, in all of its heightened space-opera glory. To love prog, Streetcrusher reminds us, is to love how gloriously ridiculous it can be.
You can stream the record below, via the band’s Soundcloud page.
