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The Worried Coat

by Adam Ostrar

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  • Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    This is the Keeled Scales vinyl reissue of 'The Worried Coat' on sandstone vinyl (limited to 100 copies).

    Includes unlimited streaming of The Worried Coat via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    ships out within 3 days
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      $22 USD or more 

     

1.
Kansas City 04:46
2.
3.
Bloody Waves 03:44
4.
Take It Back 02:47
5.
6.
7.
Pilot Light 03:26
8.
9.
Morning Said 02:08
10.
11.
12.
The Work 04:52

about

Adam Ostrar is a parent, maybe just like you, that worries about the world his kid is inheriting. He’s anxious about the damaged and ravaged U.S.A. and so are the narrators on his most recent album, The Worried Coat.

Originally released in 2019 as the last album out of the chute on a label that folded up shop, The Worried Coat effectively went out of print after tours that year with Jerry DeCicca and Simon Joyner. Keeled Scales is proud to re-introduce The Worried Coat and bring it back into print on vinyl on October 1, 2021.

With earworm lyrics like “They give you what you want, but they take it back,” an album like this might be called a "dystopia." Ostrar weaves together disparate voices. There’s no good guys or bad guys, no red or blue. It’s twelve narratives on otherness, self-identity, and our personal relationships with anxiety. How we often betray our best intentions through willful ignorance.

Each of these characters wears a different hat: In “Alex the Cretin” you hear the evangelical snake-oil salesman high on Rundgren; “Bloody Waves” is the bossanova buoy of a refugee’s displacement; in “Kansas City,” we hear Kevin Ayers as Joe the Plumber looking backwards on his false nostalgia; “Stormed the Beach” is the sound of Cluster employed by Greenpeace; “Walk the Savages Home” is the gurgle of nativism and corruption; And in “Morning Said,” Ostrar drops his tuning down to D to play pre-Page riffs while speaking to our forgotten good intentions.

“Ostrar’s personal pantheon is inhabited by great guitarists and subtle pop architects, and he invokes the with a deft mixture of instant recognition and subtle revision…Manages to merge Nick Drake and Jim Croce so deftly that you can’t quite tell how he did it” was how Dusted Magazine described the record upon its initial release.

This is Ostrar’s second solo album, the follow-up to 2017’s Brawls In the Briar. Before that, he led the early 2000 shag-carpet art-punk of Manishevitz, an early Jagjaguwar band that toured with The Mountain Goats and Edith Frost and which Pitchfork described as “vital and provocative, lyrically and musically, and it reveals itself further with each subsequent listen.”

Recorded in part in Mexico City courtesy of cult band The Moles' unused studio time, and finished at a ranch in Arizona, Ostrar wrapped and warped his Gretsch Country Gentleman guitar around these nuggets of capitalistic despair, cretinism, gaslighting, nationalism, nativism, false heroism, and that good-time tug-of-war (psssst, this game is rigged) called Inherited Wealth vs. Inherited Debt. But he wasn’t alone in making this album. He brought along Michael Krassner (Boxhead Ensemble, Lofty Pillars), Wil Hendricks (Califone, Simon Joyner), and Stephen Patterson (Hamilton Leithauser, White Rabbits).

credits

released October 1, 2021

Recorded by Michael Krassner at Drooom Studios in Oracle, AZ
Additional recording on “Talking Out Loud” “Morning Said” “Bloody Waves” at Panoram Studios in Mexico City

Mixed by Michael Krassner at Five Thirteen; mastered by Shelly Steffens at Chicago Mastering Service

Adam Ostrar - Vocals, Guitars, Synths
Wil Hendricks- Bass, Guitars, Organs, Backing Vocals
Michael Krassner- Guitars, Organs
Stephen Patterson- Drums, Percussion, Organs, Synths, Backing Vocals,

with Wally Boudway- Slide Guitar, Percussion, Backing Vocals

Cover photo “Smokey” by Adam Ostrar
Video stills by Star Rosencrans

Layout by Tony Presley and Jay Campbell

Special thanks to Michael Krassner, Richard Lynn, Jasmine Busch and Tony Presley

All songs by Adam Ostrar C&P 2019 Ostrar Melodies (ASCAP), administered by New Jerusalem Music/ASCAP

Keeled Scales (KS045) keeledscales.com

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Adam Ostrar Austin, Texas

Adam Ostrar is a parent, maybe just like you, that worries about the world his kid is inheriting. He’s anxious about the damaged and ravaged U.S.A. and so are the narrators on his most recent album, The Worried Coat. Keeled Scales is proud to bring The Worried Coat back into print on vinyl on October 1, 2021. ... more

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