Pressing Concerns: Deep Tunnel Project, ‘Deep Tunnel Project’

Release date: April 5^th
Record label: Comedy Minus One
Genre: 90s indie rock, punk, garage rock, noise rock
Formats: Vinyl, CD, digital

I’ve been aware of Chicago indie rock supergroup Deep Tunnel Project since they quietly released their first two singles in 2022 due to the involvement of Tim Midyett (Silkworm, Bottomless Pit, Mint Mile), one of my absolute favorite musicians. As it turns out, Midyett (who plays bass on Deep Tunnel Project’s self-titled debut album) was actually the last member to join the quartet, which began in 2021 when two members of legendary Chicago noise rock group Tar (vocalist/guitarist John Mohr and drummer Michael Greenlees) met up with veteran Windy City guitarist Jeff Dean (Her Head’s on Fire, The Story So Far, The Bomb) and started working together. Despite Mohr having not written songs since Tar’s dissolution in 1995, the collaboration was fruitful, Midyett was brought into the fold, and in three years they’d put together Deep Tunnel Project with the help of a few other indie rock veterans (Eleventh Dream Day’s Rick Rizzo plays guitar on “Gold Standard”, longtime engineer and Mint Mile member Matthew Barnhart recorded it, J. Robbins mastered it, singer-songwriter Rachel Draw contributes vocals to two songs).

Those familiar with this kind of music (of which I’ve written about quite a bit on this blog before) won’t be surprised by the words and terms that come to mind while listening to Deep Tunnel Project. “Workmanlike”. “Crazy Horse-esque”. “PRF-core”. Rosy Overdrive is a huge booster of Mint Mile, and they’re in the same universe (it doesn’t hurt that Mohr and Midyett are similar vocalists), but Deep Tunnel Project are more garage-y and punk-influenced than Mint Mile’s sprawling alt-country rock. Deep Tunnel Project came out a month before Steve Albini died suddenly in May, but I’m writing this after the fact, and it’s hard to not link the departure of Albini, Deep Tunnel Project, and the final Shellac album, To All Trains, together in my mind. Both Tar and Silkworm recorded almost exclusively with Albini, and Albini even shouted out Greenlees’ former SIRS bandmate Rob Warmowski on To All Trains–the connections are extensive, and though he didn’t contribute directly to Deep Tunnel Project, it’s fair to say that the trajectory of everyone involved with the album would look significantly different otherwise.

Deep Tunnel Project and To All Trains also stand together due to their deep connections to Chicago. Both album titles directly refer to the city (the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan for the former, the sign in Union Station that graces the album cover for the latter), and while Albini pays tribute to his adopted home by sketching vignettes of the city’s extensive pirate-like roving scrappers and pro-labor history, Deep Tunnel Project ambitiously seek to map out the entirety of Chicago on their album’s eleven songs. Right down to the titles of songs like “Connector”, “South Branch”, “The Grid”, and “Dry Spell”, Deep Tunnel Project draw from the geography and infrastructure evoked by their namesake, linking Chicago to Calumet to Wilmette to Dekalb to all streets namechecked in “The Grid”. 

Albini famously detested marketing and packaging (in a metaphorical sense, not so much a literal one) of his work with Shellac, and I imagine his instinctual resistance to attaching narratives to his writing was drawn from that (there’s a memorable moment in one of his final interviews, with Kreative Kontrol’s Vish Khanna, where the podcast host points out that there are multiple references to metal on the at-that-time unreleased final Shellac album. “Oh, god, I hadn’t thought about that, now I’m gonna have to think about that,” grouses Albini in reply). It’s up to us to take the time warp of “Days Are Dogs”, the “immortality” of the recently-deceased Warmowski proclaimed in “Scabby the Rat”, and the chillingly prescient closing track “I Don’t Fear Hell” together and declare that perhaps mortality influenced the art of a thirty-odd-year old band. Deep Tunnel Project don’t have that compunction–the bio for their album openly states “There’s less road ahead than there is behind us”, and, even more helpfully, follows it up with “…but there is still time left to create”.

In “Connector”, the opening track of Deep Tunnel Project, Mohr declares “What is never finished will never be done / Right now”, and he sings the first half of that proclamation again at the end of “Dry Spell”, the last original song on the record. These tracks get right at the twin themes of Deep Tunnel Project–connectivity and immortality. To work on a large work of infrastructure, one that creates, connects, or improves the lives of a large community, can be to accept that you may not personally live to see the final version of what you’re pouring your labor into. At the same time, though, it’s not like a hundred-year flipping of a light switch–every day of construction creates new connections and new avenues (literally in some cases). The members of Deep Tunnel Project were connected long before they came together as a quartet–by Chicago, by Steve Albini, by Tar, by indie rock, by boring old humanity. And yet here they are, still working together to make new music in new ways. 

“While we won’t finish what we started, much like the Deep Tunnel Project itself, we will continue working,” the band say. Deep Tunnel Project ends with “Took a Hammering”, a cover of a Breaking Circus song that features Midyett on (co-) lead vocals and is possibly the most “punk” moment on the album. If they’d ended the album with “Dry Spell”, with Mohr repeating the opening line/thesis of the record one more time, it would’ve been “perfect”, but it also might’ve come off like they believed they were putting together a finished product, wrapped and packaged in a neat bow. Instead, Deep Tunnel Project sign off by dredging up the past to create something new, both for them and in general. That’s one more linkage created in a grid that extends (and will continue to extend) far beyond the four people of Deep Tunnel Project and their collaborators. (Bandcamp link)