Antietam have been making records for longer than most bands stay together, and on The Counting Game, out now on Dromedary Records, the trio still sound like they’re finding out what they can do with a guitar, a bass, and a drum kit.
The album is the band’s 14th, and it arrives with three singles already in circulation: “Way Too Well,” “The Finest Line,” and “Every Other Star.” All three have drawn attention from outlets ranging from NPR and CREEM to Uncut and Dusted, the kind of spread that speaks to how long Antietam has been quietly building an audience without much interest in chasing one. SPIN summed up the record’s range as “tensely elegant rockers, mesmerizing free-form instrumentals, psychedelic-funk fusion.”
From Louisville to the Lower East Side
Guitarist and vocalist Tara Key and bassist Tim Harris met in the punk scene in their hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, playing together in an earlier band before relocating to New York and forming Antietam. The band debuted at CBGB, and drummer Josh Madell joined soon after, rounding out a lineup that has stayed intact ever since.
Homestead Records signed the band early on, after label figure Gerard Cosloy caught them opening for Hüsker Dü at Maxwell’s in Hoboken. Antietam’s catalog since has moved between Homestead, Carrot Top, and a handful of smaller labels, with stops along the way that include an early album produced by Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley. Critics who’ve written about the band over the years include Robert Palmer, Ann Powers, Greil Marcus, and Greg Kot. Village Voice critic Robert Christgau once called Key “the best female guitarist this side of the Atlantic.”
Dromedary’s own account of signing the band reads less like a press release and more like a friendship on paper: label founder Al has described knowing Key for years before this record, crossing paths at shows around New York and eventually booking Antietam himself, long before the idea of making an album together came up.
New Collaborators, Familiar Sound
The Counting Game keeps Key’s guitar work and Harris’s bass lines at the center, but the record brings in more outside voices than past Antietam albums have. The title track features a cello and violin duet from Harris and Katie Gentile. “Winter Watch” adds atmospheric contributions from Gentile, Mark Howell, and Tara Jane O’Neil. Kentucky musician Steve Cooley plays banjo on “Dorado Gold,” and Madell’s daughter, Trixie Madell, sings guest vocals on “Spy Vs. Spy.”
None of this reads as a band trying to reinvent itself. It’s closer to a band that’s been playing together long enough to know when a song wants something they can’t provide themselves, and who to call when that happens. The album doesn’t work as a retrospective, even with four decades of history behind it. It moves forward on its own terms, guitar-driven and unresolved in the way Antietam records usually are.
That continuity is probably the most interesting thing about a band fourteen albums in switching labels. The songwriting hasn’t changed to fit a new home. The new home changed to fit the songwriting.
Learn More
Antietam Official Website
Antietam on Bandcamp
Dromedary Records
Photo courtesy of Ellen Qbertplaya
