Birdie (Olive Green Vinyl)

Jake Ewald spent his Modern Baseball years confessing everything in the first person, then invented a whole fictional town, Slaughter Beach, to hide behind on this second full-length for Lame-O Records. The songs trade autobiography for short stories about ordinary people, and critics called the writing impressionistic and assured, with Exclaim! pegging it as a strong foundation for wherever the project went next. Ewald built himself an escape hatch and it held.