Liquid Mike Revels in Heartfelt Depth on Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot

As far as 2023 breakthroughs go, there is perhaps no artist who had one as serendipitous as Marquette, Michigan’s Liquid Mike. Years removed from the early-to-mid 2010s Bandcamp boom that elevated artists like Mitski and Alex G to indie darling status after a few self-released albums, today it’s pretty rare to see an independent act with little-to-no media buzz become an overnight sensation—granted, I’m using this term, and the term “breakthrough” somewhat liberally—almost entirely via word of mouth. This is to say, though, that one day last spring I logged on and, suddenly, it seemed like everyone and their mom was a card-carrying member of Liquid Mike Hive.

Their 2023 album S/T—their fourth in two years—is 18 minutes of short, shreddy pop rock songs; earworms like “BLC” and “Holding In A Cough” that stick in your brain like a wad of the former’s titular Big League Chew. Sonically, Liquid Mike are equal parts Superchunk and Superdrag, sitting squarely in the middle of the Venn Diagram between the poppier offerings of 2010s pop-punk from groups like Joyce Manor, Oso Oso and Rozwell Kid, and the riff-ridden slacker rock of Guided By Voices and Built To Spill.

Liquid Mike (the band) is composed of five musicians that it shares with fellow Yooper bands Charmer and Drain County. Liquid Mike (the guy) is Mike Maple, a mailman moonlighting as a budding rockstar. Beyond just a fun piece of trivia and a title for the track “USPS,” Mike’s job carrying mail for the U.S. Postal Service allows him to get to know his little corner of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula intimately, and to turn everyday nonsense into the stuff of anthems.

Within the first three tracks, Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot drops the listener in an isolated, indiscriminate town that leaves its inhabitants to their own devices, giving them no choice but to make their own mythologies. Though I cannot condone the opener’s titular activity, metallic rip-roarer “Drinking and Driving” just begs to be blasted from car windows while tearing up the highway (I must emphasize for moral and legal reasons, sober). The following “K2” is the obligatory “get-out-of-this-town” banger, crashing in with bright shiny guitars, evoking hazy nostalgia for summers past and referencing Coldplay in the most perfectly gross way possible (“You pissed your pants and they were all yellow”). The deliciously power poppy chorus of “Town Ease” offers the record’s simplistic semi-thesis statement, “we can’t think of anything to do,” its catalyst for the (usually stupid) attempts at shaking off small town boredom.

Getting so high that you get scared has never sounded as fun as it does on “Drug Dealer,” a song that, in the best way, makes you feel like you’re smoking ditch weed out of a Sprite can in a wood-paneled basement. The zig-zaggy, nihilistic “Works Bomb” needs not even a minute-and-a-half to make you want to quit your job and fuck shit up. Among the shimmering backup vocals and sugar-rushed guitar melodies of “Small Giants,” Mike offers perfectly sound advice (“You can shoplift any store you want / It’s not pathetic if you don’t get caught”) and hard-as-hell one-liners (“You made your bed, now dream of nothing”).

For a collection of songs about getting up to dumb shenanigans for no reason beyond boredom, Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot occasionally reveals Mike Maple’s hidden, heartfelt depths. He even tries his hand at a real-deal love song with the Westerbergian “Pacer,” a track whose first verse—“You put on the records / I know I’ve heard ‘em a thousand times / Did you know why / Why does it feel like the very first time / You told me you love me / I know I’ve heard it a thousand times”—feels spiritually in line with the ecstatic, adoring refrain of “What’s that song? / I’m in love!” in The Replacements’ “Alex Chilton.” It’s sweet, it’s sincere and, most of all, it slaps.

Maple’s turns of phrase get even more profound on “USPS,” but never at the expense of the record’s momentum or attitude: “Where there’s destruction there’s an outlet for fun / And that’s why Jesus made the sidewalk / So you would always have a safe place to run.” He cautions against the “get-out-of-this-town” agenda he pushed just a few songs earlier, singing, “Hey kid, you better not run away / You always go from nowhere to nowhere.” It’s not the first time on the album that he’s tempered his escapist aspirations with warnings that all roads lead to dead ends. On the Piebald-esque lead single “Mouse Trap,” he declares the American Dream “a Michigan hoax” and dismisses any attempts at escaping the rat race as futile.

“American Caveman” slows things down a bit while opting for whining guitars and a buzzy, blown-out chorus—a perfect fit for its wistful, melancholic lyrics about misspent youth: “I went looking for something strange / Found nothing but pocket change / So blew it all at the old arcade / I got older but act the same.” This track, and the title track finale both feel like meeting up with old friends you haven’t seen in forever and picking up right where you left off—though, in the case of “Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot,” this comes with the bittersweet implication that one of the friends in question hasn’t lived to see this reunion. Maple closes the record with a hook that’s as catchy as it is beautiful—“Please don’t bother trying to tie the clouds to the water”—and an invitation to hang out whenever his friends are in town. At the closing declaration of “everything works out,” the band screeches to halt, hitting the breaks on their way from nowhere to nowhere.

Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn, New York, currently based in Wilmington, North Carolina. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her work has appeared in The Alternative, Merry-Go-Round Magazine, Post-Trash, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.