CR & The White Lights - The Ghosts Are Coming Home (2023) Hi-Res

For Jersey City guitarist and songwriter Chris Gennone, it’s been a long road to The Ghosts Are Coming Home, the second album from his five-piece outfit CR and the Nones. Ghosts, the Nones’ second record and first on Magic Door, is a culmination of the sound and aesthetic Gennone has been building across many years and multiple bands. Its combination of expansiveness and introspection recalls The War on Drugs or early My Morning Jacket, and the ten tracks here showcase sincerity and heart that are impossible to resist.

Recalling past Garden State guitar music, Gennone’s soulful vocals and his band’s driving hooks invoke roads, journeys, and forward motion in general. His sound has always been propulsive, and with C.R. and the Degenerates, his previous band, he operated at a pace to match. The Degenerates released five full albums from 2016 through 2018. The band rechristened itself as CR and the Nones following a few lineup changes in 2019, retaining the core of Gennone, lead/slide guitarist Jim Abbott, and bassist John Dewitt. The CR train kept chugging along, and the band released the excellent Living in Fear on Favorite Friend in 2020.

A certain global-scale event later that year put the brakes on the band’s prolificity, though, and the isolation brought on by the pandemic as well as its huge chunks of unfilled time allowed Gennone to be more considered, thoughtful, and purposive in his songwriting. Being forced out of his normal songwriting process and comfort zone opened Gennone to new influences, and his resulting growth as a songwriter is evident in Ghosts. Some of these influences were nearby – friends in the NYC/NJ music scene contributed both ideas and sounds – and others, not so much. Gennone specifically recalls listening to Brian Eno nonstop while recording Ghosts, and the synth sounds and ambient textures that underpin much of the album are certainly a testament to that.

Ghosts was written while Gennone was dealing with personal struggles as well as lockdown, but it’s not a bleak record by any means. On “Memory Ave”, for example, a lament about inescapable chaos turns into an ode of gratitude to those who have given support throughout it all. Gennone’s voice and Ryley Crowe's pedal steel guitar pair beautifully here, and despite the hard times chronicled here, it’s impossible not to hear and share the joy CR and the Nones felt while recording The Ghosts Are Coming Home.