Pressing Concerns: Mint Mile, ‘Roughrider’

(Note: an edited and shortened version of this blog post was used as the press bio for this album. To mark the release of Roughrider, I’m presenting its original, long-winded form below.)

Release date: February 23^rd
Record label: Comedy Minus One
Genre: Alt-country, 90s indie rock, folk rock, Crazy Horse stuff
Formats: Vinyl, digital

It’s hard to believe that Mint Mile–Tim Midyett’s “new” band–is nearing a decade of its existence, but then, the group has always had an interesting relationship with the passing of time, both inside and outside of its records. Their first few years together were documented in a trio of EPs that showed the band congealing in (give or take) real time, from the casual, “is this a solo project?” debut In Season & Ripe in 2015 to the well-oiled, casual-in-a-different-way quartet captured on 2018’s Heartroller. After haunting the Chicago area (and a few other, disparate locations) as a band of indie rock veterans ripping through their growing songbook with little regard to whether or not a song was out there in the recorded world yet, Midyett, Jeff Panall, Justin Brown, and Matthew Barnhart (give or take the contributions of Howard Draper and Greg Norman) kicked off the current decade with Ambertron, a massive double album of sprawling music whose thinly-papered-over, presciently grim and sweeping undercurrents ended up allowing it to own its March 20th, 2020 release date (which was, needless to say, a death sentence for many lesser records).

Mint Mile has accomplished quite a bit over its inaugural decade of life, but the most obvious absence from its holster is the very thing that formed that backbone of the half-century-old rock music that has, in some way, shaped their current form–the “tight”, forty-minute single long-player album. This is what Mint Mile have turned in with Roughrider, their long-awaited second full-length and first to wrap its business up entirely on two sides of one vinyl record. Anyone fortunate enough to catch Midyett live either on his own or with Mint Mile knows that he’s always got new material that he’s working on, some of which one may have to wait several years before hearing in a recorded setting. Roughrider doesn’t feel like he threw a dart at eight such songs until he had enough to fill the space, but it does have a “snapshot” and “wide-ranging” feel that–while not absent from Ambertron–becomes more pronounced here due to the shorter timespan.

The tracklist of Roughrider pulls from all the rest stops Mint Mile have traversed to get here. Midyett has been building his own unique style as a baritone guitarist for decades now–beginning when he picked up the thing in Silkworm, solidifying in Bottomless Pit in the late 2000s, and blossoming in Mint Mile. It’s on full display in “Sunbreaking”, which opens the album with a pretty timeless pop chord progression but nevertheless is instantly recognizable as Mint Mile due to everything Midyett and the rest of the band do to sketch hidden melodies all throughout the song’s margins–not leaving a second underdeveloped. “Interpretive Outlook” is shockingly bare-feeling in a way that takes us all the way back to “Mountain Lion”, the first Mint Mile song on the first Mint Mile EP, but recorded with a confidence that lacks any of the “feeling out” of that era of the band.

Songs like “Halocline” have become the heart of Mint Mile, meandering Crazy Horse-fluent pieces of country rock that let Brown’s pedal steel do plenty of the heavy lifting–at least until the precariously-stacked finale where every instrument pours all it can into the song’s last minute. Nevertheless, the kinetic energy the band brings to it–aided in no small part by some excellent alto saxophone, which, hold onto that thought for a second–indicate that they’re far from out of new ways to immerse themselves in this world. Speaking of energy, Mint Mile inject Roughrider with plenty of it via “Empty Island”, the band’s finest moment as “rockers” yet as they do justice to a song that has already established itself as an excellent fixture in the Mint Mile live experience (I’d been calling it “Reverse Vampire”, after its most immediately memorable lyric). And while there’s no room for something like Ambertron’s fifteen-minute closing track “Amberline”, Mint Mile pull from this side of the band by driving the record straight into the ditch with the “merely” seven-minute “Brigadier” in the track number two slot, the song completely losing itself in its main metaphor and unmooring Roughrider from just about any frame of reference almost immediately.

One of the most admirable aspects of Mint Mile is just how in-the-present they’ve always felt; especially with their label, Comedy Minus One, concurrently running an extensive reissue campaign of Midyett’s most well-known band, Silkworm, for the new group’s entire existence, it would not be difficult for the band’s leader to lean on work he completed decades ago. So when I say that Roughrider reaches back beyond Mint Mile for help in completing the record in a way that previous Mint Mile releases haven’t, it’s no surprise that the group do it in a way that continues keeping their compass pointing due north. Contributions from cellist Alison Chelsey and Corvair’s Heather Larimer, both of whom have long been in Midyett’s orbit, are welcome, although nothing prepared me for hearing none other than Nina Nastasia–whom Silkworm covered on an EP over twenty years ago, first alerting me to her existence–sing “I Hope It’s Different”, Roughrider’s aching yet close-to-the-vest closing track. 

And that saxophone I mentioned on “Halocline” earlier? That’s provided by founding Silkworm guitarist and vocalist Joel R.L. Phelps, a truly momentous occasion for those of us who still listen to In the West on a regular basis. His contributions are a fascinating coda to “Halocline”; on “Sc ent”, the other song on which he appears, he’s very possibly the backbone of the entire song. To further contrast the band’s “old school” surface sound with the decidedly different undercurrent that Mint Mile give Roughrider, change and “the new” hover all over the record’s lyrics and subjects, from the sunrise (described as “breaking”, which I don’t think is an accident) in the opening track to Nastasia’s fervent hope echoed by the title of the album’s closing track (in that sense, it’s not too surprising that the song that most prominently features Phelps is the one that sounds the least like anything he or Midyett have ever done, together or separately). 

The more I listen to Roughrider, the more muddled this prospective dichotomy becomes, however–the most musically clear song on the album, “Interpretive Overlook”, is an inconclusive dwelling on differing perspectives and vantage points, its final line (“This place so old…it needs something new”) as certain as it is vague. Nastasia gets handed some of the album’s darkest lyrics to sing (unsurprisingly to anyone familiar with her work, she excels at it); “I Hope It’s Different” sounds as beautiful as its last stanza (“Scrub off your history / Don’t learn / Don’t remember anything”) is uncomfortable. Every trip through Roughrider supports a different conclusion drawn from these points–indeed, it does start to feel like Nastasia (and, subsequently, Roughrider) is saying something different every time.

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