Slo-Anne announces new album at Deep Cuts on Thursday, 25 January 2024.

Really Great seconds that emotion.

You don’t always get “news” news covering live gigs. Often times the band will just get right down to business, wall-to-wall songs, and get out.

Maybe they throw in stage banter or an anecdote. That makes for a little curveball; you get a sense of the artist’s sense of humor or mood. But it’s still pretty superficial stuff, and nothing you might call a cold, hard fact.

So keep your ears perked for tidbits like album announcements. Or single releases. Or tour dates. Something concrete that you can walk away with and put in a column. That makes it real “newsie,” see?

Double bonus – both Slo-Anne and Really Great reported new albums were on the way.

As far as we can tell Slo-Anne last released a studio album in 2018, called squints. A live album got released between then and now, but let’s assume the new album on the way is something different.

And Really Great’s new album follows up 2022’s So Far, No Good.

How’s that for facts? Out here killing it with the who, what, when, and where. Not so much the why and how.

The four-piece from Allston Really Great played a jangles-and-spangles indie rock set with “good bones,” dipping into old material and, presumably, material off the forthcoming album.

There’s a post punk sensibility to some of the chord progressions and melodies, though the band is not afraid to flex a little excess in the neighborhood of 70s guitar rock. You know, just a little, which you hear in the timbre of the tunes and solos.

You could hear the band play from the adjoining bar area. A patron at the counter said as much to the bartender, who was forced to agree, though he added that you couldn’t hear the music “as well” as you could inside the walled-off concert room area.

Technically true, but now that Deep Cuts has subdivided its small space into the “music” room and the “food/drink” room, a la Silhouette Lounge, everyone has to embrace the fact that you can hear the music well enough everywhere.

The real draw is seeing the music.

Or is the draw “feeling” the music in some sense? Think of how unsatisfying music livestreams are. All sight, no feel…

A Boston/Connecticut indie rock duo? It’s Slo-Anne! It must be hard to nurture and sustain a music project at a distance, like any relationship. But the states in New England are small, and the distances between them less formidable. With a new album forthcoming, Slo-Anne, much like life in Jurassic Park, finds a way. A way to rock.

Shades of a harder-edged Dear Nora, a similarly good feel for synthesizing a variety of genres that we will avoid sussing out by subsuming the music under the lazy header of “indie rock.” But if we had to draw a few out, let’s list some of the greats: blues, country, rock, mashed together with punk elan. The new album might be a banger. Extra points for the bolo tie.

Photo Gallery