Greg Freeman's All Set the Bone: Ambition Over Immediate Appeal

Greg Freeman's third album, All Set the Bone, arrives on Transgressive as a double album that trades the taut impact of last year's breakout Burnover for something larger, more diffuse and, at its best, more restless.

The Guardian's review captures the record's core tension in a single image: the album feels "like an off-brand pressure cooker: too hot, bursting at its seams, rattling with kinetic energy." That energy is Freeman's signature. The Maryland-born singer-songwriter sings as if his voice is straining at its limits, and he refuses to let his songs settle into comfort.

That refusal matters, because Freeman is ostensibly part of the growing indie-rock and alt-country revival that has taken hold over the past few years. But as the review notes, there is "nothing particularly comfortable" about the songs here. On Marooned, frantic stabs of guitar and drums create a queasy unease. The opener Cahokia begins with the catharsis of a great American road song before descending into what the reviewer calls "proggy bedlam." Freeman's lyrics feed the anxiety. On Culture, he asks: "Who do you look to when you're all on your own? When all your heroes lost their microphones?"

Burnover, released last year, made Freeman's name with taut story-songs that shifted between witty, delirious and devastating. His secret, according to the review, lay in welding a literary streak to loud, bolshy, riff-heavy music that "wouldn't sound out of place on mainstream rock radio." It was a tightly engineered machine.

All Set the Bone dismantles that machine and rebuilds it on a bigger frame. The review judges it "several orders more ambitious in its scale," with songwriting that is "more imagistic and diffuse." The verdict is balanced but clear: an impressive record that is "less immediately appealing" than its predecessor. The double-album format spreads Freeman's talents, as the review's headline puts it, a touch thin.

The shift has biographical roots. Freeman wrote the album while travelling through the United States and reckoning with what he describes as "a lot of change in my personal sense of … everything." That trailing ellipsis is telling. The searching quality the reviewer hears in the finished record matches the uncertainty of its making.

The comparison with Burnover frames the whole assessment. The earlier album delivered fireworks; the new one contains fewer of them. But the review closes on a note that keeps faith with Freeman's trajectory: "All Set the Bone contains fewer fireworks than Burnover, but Freeman still has plenty of spark."

For listeners who came to Freeman through Burnover's radio-ready riffs, the new album demands more patience. For the artist himself, it marks a deliberate widening of scope at exactly the moment his audience might have expected him to consolidate — a bet that his spark can carry a bigger, messier canvas.