Sheer Mag Share the Love on Playing Favorites

Playing Favorites also makes pit stops at more familiar haunts, like the dive bars and pool tables of “All Lined Up” and the arena rock kiss-offs “Eat It and Beat It” and “Don’t Come Looking.” But like its title track, the songs here have a reflective edge—a new hint of sadness or introspection that puts the heights they climb into sharp relief. Initially recorded during a difficult time for all four band members, the album comes from trying to rig sadness into joy and make both elements sing. As Palmer puts it, it’s the result of trying to “figure out how to have fun when you actually feel miserable.”

That tension between fun and miserable is perfect for love songs, and the ones on Playing Favorites revel in it. Named after the operatic rom-com of the same name, the psychedelic power ballad “Moonstruck” spins in dizzying feelings and movie magic, with lap-steel soaring over heartbeat drums. There’s a creeping sense, though, that those feelings might not be reciprocated—when you leave someone’s place in the middle of the night in the pouring rain, it’s hard not to think about why you left. In true Sheer Mag fashion, the crush on “Moonstruck” hits in the midst of a bar fight, in time with smashing a disco ball; the ooey-gooey emotions are equally thrilling, and maybe equally violent. Halladay’s plea for commitment could fit in a bar fight, too: “Come on, you son of a bitch!”

There’s a guardedness to all this brawling and self-aware self-destruction, of course, a fear of vulnerability that both can mask. In lesser hands, it’d go unaddressed in the name of focusing on the fun, but Sheer Mag are acutely aware of it—and in the wake of “Mechanical Garden,” that seed of introspection blossoms across three odes to domesticity and connection, however unlikely they might be. “Paper Time” and “Tea on the Kettle” flourish in the tiny rituals of a relationship while promising, Springsteen-style, to make things better—“Someday, when we can save more than pennies and dimes, we’ll go somewhere gentle,” Halladay promises on “Kettle.”

By the end of closing track “When You Get Back,” though, those promises come up empty. Over the daydreaming and the doo-wop background harmonies, Halladay cuts to the chase: “When you get back, I’ll let you know just what you mean to me.” Bookending the album’s grateful intro, this poignant finale is a cautionary tale against not saying what you mean, a reminder of how important the compassion that beams on “Playing Favorites” is. You can show you care by backing someone in a fight, or by making them tea, but maybe it’s best to just do so outright—when you love people, tell them.

Annie Parnell is a writer, radio host and audio producer based in Richmond, Virginia. Her writing has appeared in FLOOD Magazine, The Virginia Literary Review and elsewhere. Annie can be found online @avparnell and avparnell.com.