TRACK | Casual Technicians – A Lifetime In The Morning

5/5 golden merles Songwriting triumvirate Nathan Baumgartner, Boone Howard and Tyler Keene have returned with an album (Well Once There Was A King) of playful profundity, earnest strife, and drive-thru funerals. While melodically devoted, it is also again an anomaly among a landscape of folk and rock dominated with fashion, franchise, and anti-poetics. “It feels too easy to forget/the lie I settle on”Conceptually the album starts from a bizarre notion of songwriting: what if melody wasn’t a crutch for generalities but instead an enhancement to storytelling populated with keen or amusing observations? A novel conceit among those who generally shovel their shit my way. And, it must be said, a great relief.“If I only had a mile to go/I’d find a place to lay my head/but I’m traveling on a road that never ends”Sometimes you must subvert the song to accurately project the world back onto itself. Examples of that sort of happy mangling are many on the album: the muttered uttering of “…to…