Townie

Chronique

Although known for their sleek, Brooklyn-cool alt-pop, X Ambassadors initially came together in the upstate college town of Ithaca, New York, where singer Sam Harris and his brother, keyboardist Casey Harris, grew up. On their fourth album, 2024's Townie, they craft a heartfelt and emotional yet often viscerally painful homage to Ithaca and how it shaped them as a band. Produced by the band, it features the Harris siblings and drummer Adam Levin, with contributions by touring guitarist/bassist Russ Flynn (guitarist Noah Feldshuh left the group in 2016). The album arrives in sharp contrast to their bold 2021 effort, The Beautiful Liar, a satirical concept album of brightly colored songs centered on a fake novel and radio drama with wider political and social themes. Where that album was wildly ambitious, bringing together their heady pop and post-punk leanings, Townie is stripped down and straightforward, as if it could have been recorded in a small upstate studio. It also recaptures the moody textures and dusky intimacy of their early 2013 EPs and 2015's VHS and is their most honest and emotionally resonant album. Perhaps it shouldn't be that surprising, then, that several of the songs here, including the opening "Sunoco," have a country feeling at their core. It's a sound they've hinted at before (as on the ballad "History" off 2019's Orion), and while they never go full pedal steel, the country vibe is redolent in the overall feeling of hill-bound, rural loneliness that permeates the album. There are rootsy touches, like the arpeggiated banjo buried at the center of "Smoke on the Highway" and the steadily strummed acoustic guitar that anchors the epic emotionality of "Your Town." That song, as with others, also spotlights the gnarled, resonant twang of Sam Harris' voice, evoking more than ever the pickup-truck rock passion of artists like Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger. The album features direct references to Ithaca and the group's personal, almost journalistic experiences growing up there; it's a town they clearly have an abiding love for, even as they sing about how much they wanted to escape it as restless teenagers. It's a sentiment they underline from the start on "Sunoco," singing "Doing donuts in the parking lot/Me and my friends, we'll never get caught/6 a.m. and I feel I'll never leave this place alive." Harris also writes several songs directly about his bandmates, including his special relationship with his brother (who was blind from birth) on the poignantly felt "Follow the Sound of My Voice." It should be noted that Ithaca, New York is named after the Greek island commonly associated with Homer's classic epic poem The Odyssey, in which his hero Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, encounters a series of obstacles on his way home to his family after the Trojan War. In their own way, X Ambassadors may have left Ithaca in search of greater glory, but Townie shows just how much they've carried their hometown and its people with them on the way.

© Matt Collar /TiVo