Stray Owls - When The Going Gets Weird (2024) Hi-Res

The owls still aren’t what they seem. Stray Owls took three years to finish When the Going Gets Weird, then it took another year for it to finally put it out..

Life happened. New songs surfaced. Significantly, especially in the early days of COVID, which kept the members of this North Carolina trio from practicing IRL. With their usual songwriting process interrupted, they tinkered at home, recording and sharing embryonic audio sketches. Once Stray Owls could get together, they found themselves working with instruments outside of their usual guitars, drums and keys palette. Out came the dumbek, mandolin, piano and ukulele; Out even came the bass—a Stray Owls rarity.

“It was kind of like putting together a puzzle for three years, but we didn’t have a photo on a box to reference,” recalls Matt French, primarily a guitarist, songwriter and vocalist. There was no explicit end goal. Rather, one day he, drummer Jerry Kee and guitarist Scott Griffiths looked up, realized they had a dozen songs, and called the record done. They also realized they’d expanded beyond their simple instrumental roles—and beyond the borders of what their band had been before.

When the Going Gets Weird is a sonically rich document from the opening psychedelic jangle of “Hey Now, Now.” Sometimes the album swirls, like on the Meddle-inspired “Scapegoats,” and sometimes it builds like a rogue wave, such as on the post-rock fever dream “Whatever Afterglow.” There are nods to the rural weirdo-folk of Stray Owls earlier albums, such as on the Griffiths-fronted “Moonlight Shadows,” but it’s more twisted, more damaged than their older tunes. The song sort of splits the difference between sounding like Sebadoh covering Neil Young and Village Green Preservation Society-era Kinks, as Griffiths’ vocals lock with his brother-in-law Brian Sink’s piano, before concluding with full-on Neutral Milk Hotel fuzz. (Sink also plays piano on “Whatever Afterglow.”)

“I don’t want to waste half my life / for some BS consolation prize,” French sings on the Grandaddy-meets-early Beck “Ballad of a Middleman.” “Just to be an extra in the movie / of some Replicant’s dream.” Structurally, When the Going Gets weird intersperses lyrics- driven songs with the aural equivalent of negative space: drones and collages and soundscapes. A few tracks draw from both directions, such as noisy folkscape “Elemental Static,” which juxtaposes noisy clatter with placid instrumentalism as North Carolina journalist and musician Corbie Hill’s reads his existential meditation “198 words about bodysurfing.” “There were a lot of ‘What if we...’ conversations that led to more adventures in backwards recording, vibrato bass and looped guitar bits,” Kee says. If recording When the Going Gets Weird was Stray Owls’ response to the long COVID lockdown it was also, almost paradoxically, an exercise in not taking time for granted. French was drawn to a mug with an image of a caterpillar turning into a moth as it approaches a bug zapper, inscribed with the words “give yourself time.” And having given themselves time, Stray Owls’ latest record was allowed to grow organically into their richest listening experience to date. “Everything that stuck to the wall is somehow cohesive,” French offers. “And that’s the album.”