All Ages
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Greg Freeman, All Set The Bone
Greg Freeman won’t be getting comfortable anytime soon. Across New Mexico, Vermont, Los Angeles, and a long stretch of tour stops hooking those places together, All Set The Bone came alive. While writing and recording it, Freeman moved out of his longtime home in Burlington, holed up in a middle-of-nowhere part of the Southwest, and stepped into music full-time, leaving behind odd jobs as a cemetery landscaper and restaurant line cook. The following album is populated by a grain of similarly unsettled people: a voter buried in credit card debt, a pair of Christian hearts clanking like trapped lobsters, a town of bent necks, a lover with limbs bent like crabapple trees. Freeman calls All Set The Bone a “reflection of a lot of change, and a lot of tension.” It’s a box of political and personal yarns spread across four sides, “inhuman events” and grief pulled into a “perfect tsunami.”
Freeman was barely done making Burnover when he started writing its successor. He chased disruptions with confidence, creating on impulse rather than familiarity. “I had this epiphany moment where I understood what the next record should be,” he says, “which surprised me, because I thought it would take a lot longer to have the influences or inspiration required to undertake writing a new album.” What arrived instead were radioactive songs that never seemed overworked or moralizing. There may as well have been a “no overthinking” sign pasted above the studio door.
Traces of pre-Good News Modest Mouse and early Pavement linger, but All Set The Bone resists easy lineage through a deliberate fracture that’s twisting yet familiar. Freeman’s longtime obsessions with Fugazi and Unwound color the album’s heavier dirges—like “Hail Mary”’s math-rock chords snapping against post-hardcore distortion—and its spangled outposts grew from a diet of Big Star, The Drones, and Mission of Burma. The best parts of All Set The Bone blink like psychotic blues ramp-ups, while the heavy-metal/weeping violin onslaught of “Untitled 10” leaves room for punches of brass. Lyrically, Freeman’s pen is too strong for analogy, as he riffs on bodies turned to ground beef, or chasing a dream but settling for a niche.
After Burnover’s queasy fixation on ghost stories and various New York locales and histories, Freeman again returns to the immediacy and anxiety of time and history, building a choir of questions out of constellations where “the light pours in the like hourglass sand.” Opener “Cahokia” is titled after the ancient Indigenous mounds that sit on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, whose builders disappeared. Freeman uses taxidermy and amber-casted bugs to contextualize songs about love and grief in “Untitled 10.” Near the end of side one, he even makes this striking declaration: “No culture, and no more rock and roll.” But “Decade” may sum All Set The Bone up best: “History rubbernecks at each of your darkening thoughts.” Freeman says there’s a “sense of time running out, of us becoming stuck in the trajectory of our own history.” It’s a theme that he’s been unpacking since I Looked Out, but he’s never done it better than right here in these seventy minutes.
And what we get is paradoxical: Freeman’s most exposed writing but also his most evasive. Songs like “Costs” cut closer to direct confession: “in the flash of puke’s surrender, I relive life through every bender,” or the “thousand gears between my ears, working overtime to taxidermy every worthy heartbreak into rhyme.” But much of All Set The Bone is grounded in second-person. It’s not used as a tool for distance, but a means of rejecting any prescriptive tones. When Freeman asks, “Do you feel your world will shatter at the slightest touch? Is it the child in you that’s scared to feel too much?,” the effect never sounds sanctimonious.
Freeman’s audience ignited like brimstone in 2023. Songs like “Come and Change My Body” have eclipsed the critical circles that first engaged with his music, making Freeman a bonafide threat to indie-rock’s throne. The attention, he says, still catches him off-guard. “I never get used to that, or take that for granted,” he says. “But, on the flip side, I don’t think about it too much when I’m writing music, and I think that’s important when you’re making something genuine. It’s about what you want to make, not what other people want.” That stance has become more complicated now that music is what pays his bills. Touring occupies most of his calendar, while recording happens in the gaps it leaves open. Instead of enjoying a multi-year hiatus between Burnover and All Set The Bone, he pushed straight into the latter, emerging with an hour of total music devotion.
He assembled a band built to embody and obliterate contradiction—to walk the tightrope between chaos and precision. The “I wanna feel like a drummer, felt but not shown” line in “Indu” says it best, as the Greg Freeman Band is at its most spectacular when parts are heard as a sum. Freeman’s longtime collaborators Garrett Linck and Sam Atallah, Florry’s Joey Sullivan, and The Rockin Worms’ Carney Hemler lived with him in the California desert, practicing for a few weeks before hitting record. He’s also joined by songwriters Anna McClellan and Trinity Ace, whose vocal ranges complement the distinctiveness of his shrill, creaking voice rather than overwhelm it. Freeman doesn’t ask for much from his duet partners. “Someone who can sing with me and make it sound good” is enough. McClellan’s “high glottal” rises above his upper range, while Ace’s deeper harmonies sit naturally beneath his.
Where I Looked Out and Burnover were made closer to home in Vermont, All Set The Bone was redirected westward, landing in Los Angeles under the guiding hand of producer John Congleton. The shift from Burlington staple Benny Yurco to Congleton seemed like a risk initially, but his and Freeman’s chemistry proved immediate. “Even when you can’t describe exactly what you want, he knows what you’re talking about,” the guitarist says. The sessions flourished through instinct: the album’s rawest moments, like “Bury Me The Shovel,” were treated as live, impromptu propositions from the outset, built to remain unpolished. In “Loser’s Prize,” Freeman writes about the fears of love “nursed by catastrophe, yet protected by the limits of its own memory.” Just as he did on I Looked Out and Burnover, he dives well and far here into what it costs to live through the present moment, and his band’s instrumentation mirrors that with dense song structures and spacious improvisation.
Freeman made I Looked Out without expectation or remorse. On All Set The Bone, he embraces friction instead of refusing it, using scant rehearsal times and urgent, self-appointed deadlines to fill his third album with ambitious whims: smile-stretching guitar scorchers, cosmic percussive surges, near-baroque piano riffs, psych-rock noodles, brass cutouts, and enough key changes to build an unsolvable musical maze. All Set The Bone was finished quickly, in a real Hollywood studio with one of rock’s best modern architects, and with minimal separation between idea and outcome. For Freeman, uncertainty has become his wealthiest currency. “It should never feel comfortable,” he says. “Every album should scare you.”
