Minnesota’s heartland rock band Keep For Cheap is, as I have written, a band after my own heart. Big Grass lopes gently along, chronicling that exquisite nostalgia of feeling old and wise at the age of 25. Keep For Cheap takes pride of place in living out and proud in the Midwest: this album is as much autobiography as it is a love letter to the region. The music laps against us just like the ripples of the lakes the band expresses such fondness for.
That doesn’t mean the band paints an idyllic picture of their lives. “FedEx” directly calls out the hypocrisy of legislating away trans youth’s rights. “Lakehouse” juxtaposes the joys we find in life with the mounting systemic horrors that are not as far as away as we’d like to pretend. There are also intimate tragedies, like the demolition of a high school — as mixed as its legacy may have been — and, of course, people growing apart.
But Keep For Cheap aren’t wandering aimlessly through life: this isn’t the apathetic melancholy (to coin Micah Schnabel’s phrase) of millennial indie rock. Instead, Keep For Cheap are on a quest for meaning and purpose — as attested to by the powerful and ebb and flow of their rhythm section. Big Grass teaches us that it’s ok not to know what that purpose is, yet, but there is meaning in the search.