Review - Ladybird: Amy Come on Home
It's still spring, but the “hell yeah” album of the summer has already arrived. It's by a raucous alt-country band out of Milwaukee called Ladybird, and it's an ungodly amount of fun.
You know what I mean: You’re at a backyard party and this album’s cranking, at some point you’re going to raise your PBR and let out a “hell yeah!”
Photo by Samer Ghani
Ladybird has been playing around Wisconsin and beyond since forming three years ago, opening for Jess Williamson, Sarah Shook and the Disarmers and others, amid headlining their own shows too.
They’ve put out two EPs, and now comes their first full-length, Amy Come on Home. It’s a hoot. I drove around for a couple weeks with this album blasting, and I’m lucky I didn’t get a speeding ticket.
Ladybird wrote the album and leaned increasingly into the band’s hard-rocking alt-country sound over the last year and a half.
“Our sound became more full, our amps got louder, and we became more comfortable in the songs we were writing,” frontman Pete McDermott said. “We began to lean into the aspects of the louder side of our influences. From this came what you hear on the record – a melodic blend of big breakdowns in country rock ballads and fast and loud anthems about tall queens and honky tonk mamas.”
There’s a little Waco Brothers in there, some Old 97s, maybe even a hint of Lynyrd Skynyrd.
McDermott recruited bandmates Sam Szymborski, Josh Rardin and Aidan Gouran with the tongue-in-cheek pitch, “want to be in my Drive-By Truckers rip-off band?”
The band channels the Truckers’ hard-rocking southern noir on “Kemp Lane,” all growling guitars and tender recollections. McDermott reminisces about a long-ago love, back when he had “a head full of feeling and a new set of wheels / Miles of open road and green grass,” and she had “bloody eyes and scraped up knees / You were the queen of Market Street.” It’d fit seamlessly on Southern Rock Opera.
That first “hell yeah” might come at the menacing opening guitars on “Kemp Lane,” offset by echoey pedal steel contributed by Will Hansen, who plays on the album and joins the band for its upcoming string of shows.
Another “hell yeah” comes on “Honky Tonk Mama,” resurrected from last year’s EP. A concert favorite, it’s a barnburner, all wiry lead guitar, power chords and galloping beat, with Szymborski lamenting his lost tough-chick girlfriend who’s always ready to “pick a fight with any poor sap that crosses the line.”
Like well-chosen songwriting hero John Prine, Ladybird’s songs (and social media) are suffused with humor.
“Short King Shuffle” finds the height-challenged McDermott lying on the dating apps that he’s “a clean 6-3” but nevertheless wins over a tall queen with his sweet moves. “Sometimes it's hard for them tall girls to see / She's scanning through the bar looking right over me / So I knocked on her buckle and I asked for a dance / And when she saw my shuffle she was sure I was gonna be her man.”
In “Fight Song,” he’s too old for this crap, “but listen up, I'm trying to be stable / I'll drink you clean under the table, mm-hmm,” and “I may be old and going gray / but I'll kick your ass just the same,” all sung in a bemused two-part harmony.
Oh hell yeah.
McDermott and Szymborski, who share songwriting duties, show a keen eye for detail and a well-turned phrase. The narrator of “Worried Mind” says of his wife’s wedding ring, “I've seen it on your bedside stand / more than I've seen it on your hand.”
At dusk on “Kemp Lane”: “Them singing bugs surrounded us / You killed the engine to an uproar.”
And it’s there on the melancholy album closer, “Amy Come on Home,” whose character of Bobbi has “pupils big as the moon and smelling like Genny Light.”
That song features a clever song structure. Its characters are looking back at these gritty lives of theirs, punctuated by a few too many cheap beers. Bobbi’s got her Genesee Light, Lisa’s got her Grain Belt, and Amy’s got her “Champagne of beers.”
Gimme a hell yeah, and raise a toast to one of Milwaukee’s finest.
Amy Come on Home hits the streamers and Bandcamp on May 17. CDs and vinyl will be available on Bandcamp and elsewhere after Ladybird’s record release shows in Milwaukee on June 1.
Find out more about Ladybird at the links below: