Pete Mancini has a something of a niche in spinning suburban ennui into wistful Americana. Mancini, who hails from deep Queens (not Long Island, as I had previous posted; I deeply apologize for this oversight), is a kindred spirit of this lifelong New Yorker. Even from his Butcher’s Blind days, Mancini expressed disgust at the hypercapitalism that drives the bedroom communities of the Northeast. On Killing the Old Ways, Mancini turns that focus to city living and brings a more robust sound to the table alongside the wider lens. Track titles like “High Rise Serenade” and “Madison Avenue Blues” give a sense of the foreboding urban isolation to come, but Mancini’s penchant for the cosmic sounds of the ’70s softens the blows into intense loneliness.
But Mancini also transforms that sadness into rage, an emotion not yet scene in his music. “Madison Avenue Blues” is exactly the kind of post-9/11 commentary I’ve been waiting for in country music. Because if you came of age in the greater New York metro area on 9/11, you get it. The trauma of watching thousands of people die in real time, watching your home enter lockdown so rapidly it felt like it was occupied, the years afterward of the lingering fear in the back of your mind that your loved ones might not make it back from the office…only to have that transformed into 9/11 Memorial gift baggies carried around by tourists, a stop on the list just like Times Square.
The bigger feelings come with a bigger sound. The album’s title track skewers the Mad Men mentality that have brought literal and figurative towers around our ears. Enlisting a cello to round out the sound, Mancini’s condemnation of late-stage capitalism is laced with menace and mournfulness.
On “Patchwork,” premiering exclusively this Bandcamp Friday on Adobe & Teardrops, Mancini weaves the personal and political into a hard-driving country song. Mancini interrogates what kind of America, exactly, it is we’re preserving in Americana music, using the genre to call attention to the fallacies of the past and the absurdities of the present.
Killing the Old Ways will be out on April 8 via Paraddidle Records.