Cultural Norms

The Portland quartet Blanket Music have come into their own with their third studio album. Recorded with Adam Selzer (The Decemberists, M. Ward, Norfolk and Western) at Portland's Type Foundry Studio, Cultural Norms is an organic, eclectic mix of Motown pop, Memphis blues, northern soul/funk, and chamber pop. The obvious modern day touchstone would be Belle and Sebastian, but as with Move and Nice, Blanket Music distinguish themselves with a penchant for reinventing themselves with each album and infusing their songs with genre-bending verve. Cultural Norms is as much a departure musically as it is lyrically. Here Chad Crouch confronts contemporary hot topics and with an eye for detail, charming wit, and multidimensional character-driven narratives. Topically alighting on reality television, obesity, gay marriage, Picasso's Guernica, the Iraq war, the digital music revolution, video games, dollar stores, and one particularly tongue-in-cheek censure of bitter taste makers, Cultural Norms serves up a toe tapping, unvarnished portrait of contemporary American values. It's no Born in The USA. Nor is it a protest album. Instead Cultural Norms is a wide angle view of America through unlikely different points of view: the soldier, the cat, the dollar store manager, the teenager... In essence, a cast of nobodies making ordinary observations with extraordinary overtones.