On "Crowded Room" singer-songwriter, producer The March Divide pushes nostalgic buttons

AP Track Review

The phrase "damning with faint praise", the idiom that serves up half hearted praise or even snarky condemnation is a poison arrow and I only mention it in regards to Crowded Room by The March Divide, aka San Antonio-based artist, singer-songwriter, producer Jared Putnam because when I first listened to the track, in my mind, I had a lot of negativity to spew. I think that sometimes being a music writer and listening to so much music you can lose sight of the purpose of songs (there are many and this is not the place to go down that road) and sometimes pure originality is not the end all. It is a lesson learned hard especially for those like me whom some might consider a music snob.

At first glance Putnam does use a lot of musical tropes, the clipped acoustic loop at the beginning, conventional (though very well placed) drum fills and patterns, the staccato feel on the chorus and bent lead line edging into dissonance, a nice pained vocal performance with self stacked backing vox, and the acoustic guitar break that falls into a double time heavy guitar lead. I veer toward the avant garde side of all genres but this feels like a well produced commercial slice of rock circa late 90's / 2000's in the vein of bands like Third Eye Blind (in fact I hear a bit of Stephan Jenkins in Putnam's wail), Jimmy Eat World and Everclear.

In the end Crowded Room by The March Divide deserves the praise minus faint. I realized that when I listened to it for the 8th time in a row with a smile on my face. It has a sense of nostalgia and pushes those warm memory buttons so well. The real truth is that using indie rock conventions is fine if in the end they make you feel something.
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Robb Donker




THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM - PRESS NOTES:

You think we’d know Jared Putnam by now.

Over the course of three “impressively hooky” (American Songwriter) albums, five “completely clever” (Performer Magazine) EPs, numerous singles, and a batch of cover songs in a mere half-decade, Putnam’s mostly one-man project The March Divide has delivered a seemingly unending stream of songs that have established the San Antonio-based artist as one of the best rock songwriters working today.

Putnam’s upcoming fourth The March Divide album is Anticipation Pops (Aug. 24th, Slow Start Records) and is his best work to date, mostly because the ten songs here reveal a greater emotional depth, along with performances, and lyrics, that go beyond anything that Putnam has offered up before. Perhaps his near-manic recording and touring schedule was prologue that has led to the relatable sensitivity that is this album.

“This record feels like a new direction,” Putnam says.

Recording at home on the fly, and skipping his usual demo and pre-production process, has allowed Putnam to maintain a spontaneous feeling that informs these songs, and obviously kept him from overthinking lyrics or anything else that stood in the way of a group of tunes that could be called “raw” if Putnam wasn’t so good at producing himself and if the word “raw” didn’t scream “under produced.”

That is to say: these songs sound great.

Putnam claims that the work on Anticipation Pops represent a thematic “consistent inconsistency,” different from his more planned past albums. And while he dials that back when he agrees that the album is cohesive, he’s either being modest, or is far enough outside of his comfort zone now not to notice that Anticipation Pops is actually his most thematic record of all.

Writing ten personal songs from a unique perspective, but relatable to everyone, is an artistic goal most songwriters never achieve. True to Putnam’s attitude of throwing caution to the wind with this album, the first single is the record’s aptly titled opening cut, “I Don’t Care,” a two-minute gem that leaves ‘em wanting more.

“I think there’s something really special about a two-minute pop song,” Putnam says. “It’s like a shot of adrenaline. A song like that is a flash – it comes and goes – and is unexpected. ‘I Don’t Care’ really sets the tone. It’s a slow build of liberation and confidence, expressed in just two minutes.”

Doubling down on the attitude of “I Don’t Care,” Putnam affirms once again that he made Anticipation Pops by deciding, “this is what I’m doing, take it or leave it.” Apparently he didn’t know that the result would be the work his fans can care for most of all.

Anticipation Pops, the fourth full-length album by The March Divide dropped August 24th, 2018, on the artist’s recently co-founded Slow Start Records label, preceded by the single, “I Don’t Care”.