Bug Martin & Co -- WHAT REMAINS

The new EP from Bug Martin & Co touts the Pennsylvania landscape, and it’s easy to imagine yourself gliding along verdant backroads in the four-song WHAT REMAINS. Martin, who did the layout for issues 1 and 2 of the Rainbow Rodeo magazine, turns their precise eye to their songwriting here. These are stories of losers and longing (and sometimes it’s the losers who do both.)

But that feeling of being left behind is not a downer by any stretch. “Six Against One” describes the disappointing outcome of a bar brawl with laconic tenderness. The title track gently bemoans the empty-handed grief that comes with breakups. “Oh, Jackie” is the standout here. Click in at nearly 5 minutes, it’s the gay pirate murder ballad you didn’t realize you needed, song with love and an awful inevitability. “The Record” uses LPs as an imaginative metaphor for documenting a relationship that seemed doom to fail from the start.

Bug Martin & Co deliver all these tales with spare but emotional production, allowing the listener to jump to their own conclusion as they fill in the space between voices and instruments on these songs.

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