State Champion—Stale Champagne
This review is a solid six months overdue. This is not to say that Stale Champagne has gotten lost in the shuffle of my record collection (which is currently strewn over my bedroom with unsheathed vinyl sitting atop an out-of-order Wurlitzer). No, Stale Champagne has been spinning under the needle of my record player for months now. The CD copy is perpetually in my car stereo or in the pile of receipts and change in the center console, always at arm’s reach. The more I listened to Stale Champagne the more daunting it became to write a review that actually did justice to how good this record is. Well, better late than never.
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State Champion’s full band debut is in a word remarkable, a 40-minute long 8-song amalgam of the unabated twang of country western honesty and the sparse and raw instrumentation of ethereal indie rock. Ryan Davis sings these songs with a preacher’s zeal—a secular gospel underlies the album’s guitar distortion—and I find myself picturing the songs being played in an abandoned church turned honky-tonk. The vocals echo off the rafters with messy notes reverberating through dilapidated pews. A group of ghosts tap their feet to the drum and bass and hum along with the violin. They start to get rowdy during the end of “Keeping Time”, they stand with mouth’s agape, completely speechless, during “Come See What I Have Done”, and they demand an encore after “Just an Answer.”
That’s how I picture it in my head anyway. In terms of locating State Champion’s sound outside of my overindulgent (and not especially descriptive) imagination, they sound like Hank Williams Jr. discovering shoegaze or like Towns Van Zandt after a night of hitting the bottle and listening to the MC5. The Louisville natives’ go from the quiet contemplation of a Leonard Cohen song to the grating urgency of something by Fugazi without so much as blinking an eye. If this is confusing, try hearing all of this from a band that looks like Nirvana after getting stuck in Merle Haggard's dressing room.
Stale Champagne opens with “Thanks Given” a track I had fallen in love with previously through a collection of lo-fi demos entitled Horse Paint (each with a different hand-drawn cover and tracklisting). The song is a bit more polished here, but still possesses Davis’s trademark muddled guitar playing while his whisky-worn voice winces, “Is it so wrong to just give thanks for a holiday?” and offers a follow up with the steady clang of drums and guitar noise amidst the howling proclamation, “There’s a hole in my chest where the sunshine don’t fit, but my heart still works and it bleeds through my shirt like a whip striking down the bandits and the Benedicts.” The song benefits from having a full band on board, with Mikie Poland on bass, Sabrina Rush on violin, and Aaron Osbourne on drums, concluding the song in a thundering crescendo.
State Champion is one of the few bands I can say have effectively married the intimacy, and impressive lyricism, of singer-songwriter compositions with the dynamic pull of a rock band. Davis’s writing is smart without being pretentious, imaginative without being verbose, and while it’s difficult to offer up one well written verse in an album full of exemplary lines, here is one from “Keeping Time”: “I drove to the white house in my church clothes just to see if you were sleeping on the lawn but all I found was freedom in a window blinking my name in neon, please keep it on. I fell asleep myself you know I was dreaming of the tri-state and beyond. I had Lincoln looking over me saying ‘fuck it man I guess the golden days are gone.’” The music matches Davis’s intonation perfectly—a dreamy organ purrs alongside the vocals until the drums kick in with “I had Lincoln looking over me,” and the song is carried out in foot-stomping alt-country fashion.
Stale Champagne is, as I said before, remarkable. All 8 songs are impressive, ambitious, and well-written. I can honestly say this is the best thing I've heard from Davis and crew so far, and furthermore, one of the best records I've listened to in the past year. Stale Champagne a limited pressing of 500 copies on clear vinyl. They are $15 on the Sophomore Lounge website. Buy one for yourself and everyone you know.
