They are a proper rock band, with sharp riffs, adequate guitar solos, and harmonies so close they indeed betray old friendships and biological bonds. But every member of Mildred is a songwriter, and the focus of Fenceline is decidedly its words, so much so that every syllable falls squarely beneath Temple’s spotlight. They write with a novelist’s eye for descriptive detail—the sound an empty streetside garbage bin makes, the one sailor among a rowdy dozen holding a shiny popsicle, the morning moon in an old photo.
These minutiae are the bones and joints shaping the skeleton, leaving plenty of room for the listener to build the body of the story for themselves. There is, for instance, the incredible opener “UPS Brown,” where Koehler descends through the clouds to a rainy city’s airport, only to find the ride he was expecting had other plans and that said plans include him only vaguely. I remember being 20 and flying to New York to visit my first real girlfriend, then being childishly stunned to realize she had, of course, other friends in her new home. There is the pensive title track, where Koehler toggles between self-indulgence and service to someone he loves. He daydreams about stopping whatever he’s doing to adopt a highway and planting that person’s favorite flowers beneath the roadside sign that bears his name, a perennial postcard of his good deed from a parcel he can control in our uncontrollable world. I remember the time, only a few weeks ago now, of putting aside work and play to clean baseboards and mop, so that my wife could return to a clean home after a successful but also tragic climb up North America’s tallest mountain. It felt like something I could manage, like that little strip of road median Koehler wants to paint blue.
And then there is the redoubtable “Fleet Week,” the most vivid and verbose song on Fenceline. His voice a warm but wry baritone, Schrott tangles American, Greek, and self-mythology during a visit to a World War II submarine. He considers the way simple pleasures—this poblano spread, that aforementioned popsicle—matter more than our most grand designs, from jingoism to highfalutin life aspirations. He thinks about all he doesn’t know, then offers up a summary of what he does: “I can make do with these three small rules: Keep it quiet, tight, and clean.” I don’t know that another line has ever made me simultaneously consider Davids Berman and Allan Coe, particularly the ways their weird wisdom could sparkle inside a song. I hear “Fleet Week” and think about the country’s semiquincentennial, about the small joy of chuckling at presidential plans ruined by armies of algae. You can stick your own memories to these melodies.
Mildred made Fenceline without much pressure, with a modicum of buzz so small it registers here only as room tone. Fenceline sounds natural and warm, unbothered by the need to say or do too much aside from share stories and a few philosophical musings. “I like that it’s not cool or edgy or flashy,” Fortna said of the band’s name and, by extension, their sound, “because we’re none of those things.” When I read that, I think about “Pitch Boats,” the stunning little song near the end of Fenceline. Koehler, Schrott, and Palmquist harmonize to moments from childhood when the smallest indiscretions could feel like a whole wonderful world of adventure, like setting pinecones on fire and adrift in a little ditch or trapping gophers on tennis courts. “Distant relatives in oil paint/And I’m a ghost of some little kid sneaking sodas from the shed,” Koehler sings near the end, doing his best Red House Painters. Keeping a skosh of that youthful naivete led Mildred to one of the year’s most endearing and disarming indie rock records. I hope they can keep it.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings