On Harm’s Way, Ducks Ltd. Flourish in Catchiness

I am usually wary of revivalism—not because I think it can’t be done, but because I think it’s nearly impossible to be done right. We’re seeing success right now with shoegaze and its vast family tree of hyper-rock and digicore, and there are pockets of punks and metalheads bringing back outlaw country one side of the Mississippi River at a time. Jangle-pop, however, is relatively timeless—which can be a barrier in its own right. Think about bands like self-titled-era Smiths or Murmur and Reckoning-era R.E.M. or Pylon, The Hummingbirds and Nick Lowe; their work is still being poured over by many and mimicked by countless new artists itching to catch a flame of the same accord. Jangle-pop exists in community with power-pop, rockabilly, post-punk and college rock; the framework we first saw blossom in Athens and Hoboken and Manchester hasn’t gone anywhere, serving as a rather understated blueprint for the wave of dance-rock and indie-pop that bands like Passion Pit and Vampire Weekend took advantage of during the MySpace era.

What we’ve been seeing in jangle-pop over the last five, six years, however, is a duality of success that is fiercely relentless and takes no prisoners. Most bands are either trying to put their own spin on an already-perfect genre and falling short, or they recognize what ain’t broke and, as such, work on perfecting their talents under the thumb of a formula that has never needed any fine-tuning. But even then, you have to be careful to not tumble into a reputation as The Feelies 2.0 or a half-baked revivalist ensemble. Luckily, Toronto band Ducks Ltd.—the duo of singer-guitarist Tom McGreevy and guitarist Evan Lewis—have figured out how to add their own touch to jangle-pop without saturating the foundations of their own prospects (though they did put out a cover of The Feelies’ “Invitation” last year, and we were quite impressed by it). And their sophomore album, Harm’s Way, is a massively triumphant and catchy shot-out-of-a-cannon gesture of big hooks and sticky melodies.

At just nine songs, Harm’s Way arrives as quickly as it goes, but that’s not a slight at the album nor some accusation that the music is too brief. No, it’s because these songs sink their hooks into you immediately and, by the time you realize your foot is tired from tapping, the tracklist is three, four notches ahead of where you once were. And that is because Ducks Ltd. have such an acute knack for lulling worn-in, familiar pop tropes into exciting, bright and trebly guitar-forward arrangements. Harm’s Way is frenetic and warm, seamless yet meticulous. McGreevy and Lewis wrote the album while on tour opening for bands like Nation of Language and Archers of Loaf, and the bustling, spacious instrumentation mirrors that period of travel and of new stages in new cities.

Harm’s Way begins with a slashing guitar hullabaloo before McGreevy’s voice pounces with swagger onto the scene. “All we ever do is need, eat, fuck and sleep, and then repeat forever,” he sings on “Hollowed Out.” “All they’ll do is leave, rise and recede.” The track is strapped with familiar voices, as Ratboys’ Julia Steiner and Marcus Nuccio (who also plays drums on most of the album’s arrangements), Dehd’s Jason Balla and Moontype’s Margaret McCarthy dole out harmonies and Finom’s Macie Stewart provides a string accompaniment. Ducks Ltd. collectivize Joy Division guitars and a Deerhunter-style echo chamber on the singing; it’s stacked in reverb and arrives like a greatest hits compilation wrapped up into one three-minute instant classic, as McGreevy and Lewis muse on existing in places that are fading into the background and turning towards an unfamiliar strangeness. “All we ever do is leave, a slow retreat through the same old scene forever,” McGreevy continues. “Darker at the city’s seams, collapse the street, a world unseen whatever.”

“Cathedral City” boasts a vibrant, soaring riff paired with a throbbing undercurrent of bass from Julia Wittman and subtle synthesizers. The guitars on Harm’s Way don’t scream like a hot rod but, rather, like a 1985 Toyota Corolla GT-S—they’re dependable, sleek, light as a feather, built to last. The way McGreevy and Lewis bounce their playing off of one another and then, in a flash, weave their histrionics together like million-dollar yarn; it’s poetry-in-motion, a bat out of chrome-colored hell. “Deleted Scenes” steps away from the Johnny Marr of it all and flirts with dream-pop territory, before Lewis delectably shreds his arpeggios like he’s auditioning for the War on Drugs with a Cure song. “A Girl, Running” brings the album back into focus with three-chord punk rock glossed in fastidious, hurried, expressive and nervous energy that only Ducks Ltd. can truly embellish with such candy-coated, loose finesse. The title track, likewise, clamors onto feverish rhythm guitar from McGreevy, while Lewis contorts his lead axe like a python gripping a human leg.

Recalling the work Ducks Ltd. did on their 2021 LP Modern Fiction, McGreevy and Lewis are unabashedly content with recycling licks and offering no solutions to the anguish they sing about. They aren’t making nihilistic music, instead engaging with stories that tug on hope yet don’t ignore the dreariness of it all. And it can be easy to overlook that push-and-pull, given that Harm’s Way lingers in its own jitteriness and wants you to feel first, think next. It’s what makes songs like The Smiths’s “This Charming Man” or Orange Juice’s “Rip It Up” timeless, this propulsive, aching urge to play fast, sing about being bruised and, most of all, juxtapose thrashing, explosive tempos with tender, sugary octaves.

On “The Main Thing,” Ducks Ltd. revel in C-86 splendor, hiking up the tempo’s adrenaline and ripping through the melody like they’re strumming with knives and trying to give themselves carpal tunnel. But “The Main Thing” is a crucial example of why Harm’s Way doesn’t rip up the jangle-pop playbook: The song unveils a story of sorrow sedated by McGreevy and Lewis’ propensity for abject catchiness. When McGreevy sings “Living like a middle reliever, innings eater on a losing team. Showing up and doing what I get paid for, year, we’re all just playing out the string,” you might initially miss it—on account of Nuccio’s drumming sputtering like a kaleidoscope, feeding into a melody that sounds like a Ducks Ltd. personification of the Charlie Brown and his friends dancing.

Album standout “Train Full of Gasoline” is two minutes and 50 seconds of post-punk mastery, with an arrangement that chugs along like its namesake. McGreevy uses the Lac-Mégantic rail disaster in Quebec—when a train full of crude oil rolled down a hill before derailing and exploding in a town—as a vessel for his own laments about self-destructive patterns and the consequences of small errors. “It’s always another dagger hidden in the sleeve, another bullet in the magazine,” he sings, “a way to get yourself set up to roll back down that same long track.” Steiner and McCarthy amplify the choruses like harmonious set pieces, and Ducks Ltd. turn locomotive with leather-clad new wave flourishes and machine gun riffs.

Closer “Heavy Bag” is a sonic outlier on Harm’s Way, but no less emotionally grounded. McGreevy and Lewis turn an homage to misery into a stripped-down ballad that meanders in its own confessional abstraction. “The patterns that we’re in, wearing thin, and now you’re getting out to seek a different sea for drowning in,” McGreevy sings. “I guess I’m sad I won’t be the one dragging you down.” With cheeky nods to listening to Thin Lizzy while circling the drain on despair, “Heavy Bag” makes sense as a bookend to Harm’s Way—an album about cyclicality written during a cyclical tour spent nursing cross-country exhaustion—by sticking out like a sore thumb, as if Ducks Ltd. intentionally want you to remember that, at its jangly, syrupy core, Harm’s Way is a sad album with no conclusion other than it’s dark outside all the time.

It’s only their second LP, but Ducks Ltd. are dialed in to their own craft, immune to the plateaus of unearned repetition by the sheer magnitude of their own good-sounding realism. They’ve earned this record and these tracks, and their attention to repurposing riffs runs deeper than McGreevy’s vocals or Lewis’ shredding: When you strip away all of the language and percussion and catchiness of Harm’s Way, the sorrow we’re left with sounds the same.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.