In the ongoing collapse of our collective attention span, the modern indie band at the 5th-album mark draws closer to endangered species status. Rarer still are bands who have managed to maintain the same integrity of creative purpose as Frontier Ruckus.
Enter the Kingdom, their 5th and most lush record to date, serves as an almost desperate invitation into the band’s most recurrent setting: the suburban American household. It is immediately apparent, however, that the emphasis this time is not so much on idyllic nostalgia but the very real and present tense disintegration of a personal kingdom once thought permanent.
Songwriter Matthew Milia has explained the album as a rather literal depiction of his father losing his job and relying on disability checks to retain a tenuous grasp on his childhood home. The specificity with which this is conveyed to the listener is harrowing at times, though never in full abandonment of a dark and balancing sense of humour.
Presented by Lonesome Highway
(MOJO)“Well-educated, literary-inclined American songwriters are hardly thin on the ground, but Frontier Ruckus’s Matthew Milia’s poetic inclination always sets him apart”
(UNCUT)“Full of muted desperation, Milia conjuring a less-than-cosy world of strip malls, Prozac and missed opportunities with humour and pathos…”
Frontier Ruckus