News on the March, Glory Be! (the EP!)

At its core, Glory Be! (the EP!), the latest release from quintet News on the March is, well, backwoods bedroom-pop. There’s countrified sincerity dripping from every note, alternately echoey and jangly, rough-yet-pretty guitars, down-at-the-heels lyrics that’re perfect to mumble along to while crying into your beer, and deft rhythms. At the same time, though, the gorgeous harmony vocals on tracks like “Hey Operator” or “Holdin’ Hands ‘n’ Texas Sunshine” are less high-lonesome and more Pet Sounds, all beautiful, boyish melody and sincerity. The structures, instrumentation, and even subject matter are very much in the country realm — see the dark undercurrent to “Operator” and “A Song for Your Sweetie” — but the embellishments, voices, and production are totally Songs From Northern Britain.

Honestly, this EP’s like a bunch of kids from the sticks took every single Parasol, Drive-In, and Sarah Records release ever made, threw in every Teenage Fanclub and Posies record they could find, ground them all up into powder, and inhaled the whole damn thing right before picking up their instruments for the first time. You almost expect the five members of News on the March to have sprung, fully-formed, out of some idyllic backwoods paradise, like a gentler, sunnier Kings of Leon.

(Okay, so that’s pretty far-fetched, right there — the members of NotM have in fact been floating around the Houston scene for quite a while now. It blows my mind that at least one member of this band used to play in iconic grindcore band Humanicide, undoubtedly News on the March’s polar opposite…)

A fair amount of the time, Glory Be! comes off like Dubliners The Thrills, who craft a similar melding of country and retro-pop, except that where the Irish gang are/were somnolent and mopey, News on the March are (thankfully) smiling and vibrant, like an old, well-loved picture come to life. There’s definitely still that sun-soaked sound that evokes the Beach Boys and The Mamas & the Papas, but the music’s less about lazing around on the beach than it is getting outside and actually enjoying the sunshine. (Since, you know, Houstonians have a fair amount of that, too.) The songs swing and sway nicely, understated in all the best ways, and even when things get a little bitter, like on tell-off song “Wisconsin, Pt. 2,” they’re subtle and world-weary and genuine.

The one oddball of the bunch is “A Song for Your Sweetie,” which is simultaneously old-timey cheery and grimly bleak, like Murder By Death covering a barbershop quartet. This wouldn’t sound out of place coming from a bandstand back in the other seriously economically-depressed era, albeit the sepia-toned one. Where the rest of Glory Be! is sweet and rustic, beach-front pop with leather fringe and worn-out boots, “Sweetie” is a story-song worthy of some musical lurking in the News on the March crew’s head.

Despite it’s dissimilarity from the rest of the EP, though, part of me suspects that this song is actually the style these folks are leaning towards, at least some of the time. And whether it’s the barbershop quintet from Hell or Teenage Fanclub-meets-Son Volt, News on the March does it damn well.