Peter Hughes spent two decades playing bass in the Mountain Goats, touring relentlessly until the pandemic forced a pause that became permanent. Half-Staff Blues is what happened when he finally had time to write his own songs, eleven tracks recorded in Melbourne with members of the Ocean Party and Pop Filter, the Australian indie scene he'd been obsessing over from upstate New York. The album title sets the tone. These are songs about empires winding down, about logging off, about the gap between Barack Obama playlists and actual political reality. Hughes writes from Rochester, a rustbelt city where the Kodak money dried up decades ago, and that post-industrial unease runs through everything here.
The band, Lachlan Denton, Liam Halliwell, Jordan Thompson, Curtis Wakeling, give the songs a loose, lived-in feel. Guitars jangle and overlap, drums shuffle without fuss, and the production stays out of the way. It sounds like people in a room, not a studio trying to sound like people in a room. Halliwell and Wakeling engineered and mixed it, and they've kept the textures warm and direct. There are samples from TrueAnon, additional vocals from Chloe Sanger, and a track called "Suicide Cult" that features an exhortation from Natalia Castro-Hughes, but nothing here feels cluttered.
This is for anyone who liked the Mountain Goats' lyrical specificity but wanted more bite about the present moment. Also for fans of that Melbourne scene, if you know Pop Filter or Partner Look, you'll recognise the approach.
