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“The Bar Near Where Jeff Lives,” the first track on Stoner Control’s new album, The Bottom of a Hill You Know, is the kind of song anyone who’s lived in one place for long enough can connect with.
The album is a catalog of close friends who have moved away and beloved neighborhood establishments that have closed since the Portland power-pop band formed in 2013. Though singer-songwriter and guitarist Charley Williams says it comes off as an “accidental gentrification song,” he insists its theme is broader: “I wanted to talk more about appreciating things, because things change so quickly.”
That’s especially true in Portland’s music scene. The Bottom of a Hill You Know, out this Friday, is the band’s first album to feature songs written post-COVID following a live music apocalypse and subsequent rebirth that’s spawned countless new bands. The post-pandemic music scene has by now fully embraced the loud, hooky rock sound Stoner Control has been playing since Portland’s post-’00s folk hangover.
Stoner Control’s sound has stayed sturdy throughout this time. “We try to do loud-guitar, kind of poppish music,” Williams says. “But these arrangements are a little more straightforward than the last record. The trajectory of this band has gone from very punk to more like pop punk to more straight-ahead rock ’n’ roll.”
The Bottom of a Hill You Know feels like a back-to-basics album, even if Stoner Control has never strayed especially far from the basics. The band started in 2013, but their roots go back to 2006, when co-frontman and bassist Sam Greenspan and drummer Michael Cathcart formed a duo called the Greencarts at a time when Greenspan says “two-pieces were super cool.”
The songs on The Bottom of a Hill You Know were winnowed down from a much larger stockpile of post-COVID songs. At 11 tracks, it’s a sprawler compared to the band’s typically bite-sized releases.
Some of those songs ended up on Glad You Made It and Smoke in the Valley, two interstitial EPs recorded with producer Matt Thomson just to “get some songs out of the way,” according to Williams. “We were still practicing and Sam and I just kept on writing newer songs. We kept on pushing it back because we were like, oh, we got new songs, we don’t want to record those, so they just piled up.”
When establishing the final curation for The Bottom of a Hill You Know, the idea was less to focus on an overarching theme than to “pick 11 songs that we think are good,” Williams says, out of the dozens in the pile.
Yet a theme shines through anyway: the precariousness of living in a place that’s constantly changing around you. It’s a bit of a shock to realize, for example, that Echo Echo, the studio in which the band recorded “The Bar Near Where Jeff Lives,” has since shut down.
“I’m really grateful we got to one of the last things that came out of that,” Williams says. “That’s another example of what that song’s about. We should make sure we value these spaces, because they might not be there forever.”
SEE IT: Stoner Control album release show with Shawna Pair and Stomach Sleeper at Swan Dive, 727 Grand Ave., swandiveportland.com. 8 pm Saturday, Dec. 20. $12. 21+.
