If the title Donkey Howdy or the wildly colorful distorted cover art doesn’t tip you off, Dialup Ghost is having fun on their fifth full-length. Quite frankly, they’ve always been a band that’s chosen to express themselves as they are rather than posturing to be anything else. The best examples of this from previous records would be the light-hearted-but-dead-serious “Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn is a Drug Dealer” and the possibly-most-empowering-and-loving-and-optimistic track “Transphobes and Fascists Hate Our Guts (So What)“? To be clear, Dialup Ghost has plenty of other great songs that aren’t standing up against the injustices of the world, I just think they’re particularly good at it.
On Donkey Howdy, the band embraces a lo-fi aesthetic balanced with consistently grooving drumbeats and driving bass lines with outbursts of deliciously fuzzed-out guitars. The country twinged vocals of Russ Finn lend an air of authenticity on “Bigger Household” – particularly when he sings “Baby, let’s move to the country” complete with a plea to have a multitude of babies. The band ponders the literal Nashville music scene on “Music City Mockingbird,” providing goofy but introspective ruminations about a town that is filled with empty posturing. If you need an entry point to the record, lead single “Soot Sprite” finds the band delivering a frantic pace of excessively upbeat vibes start to finish.
The writeup that accompanies the record states that the band consciously chose to steer towards instrumentation on this record that they had gravitated to in the past. Eschewing mandolin and pedal steel for synthesizers is not an easy choice, but it’s clearly working. They also claim to be embracing their post-punk and garage-pop side over alt-country… but I’d argue it’s been there all along, they’re just setting it free to be it’s truest self.