Greg Freeman: All Set the Bone review – ambitious alt-country double album spreads its talents a touch thin

(Transgressive) The Maryland singer-songwriter’s third album has an impressive sense of scale compared to last year’s breakout Burnover, but is less immediately appealing Greg Freeman’s third album All Set the Bone feels, at its best and most nervy, like an off-brand pressure cooker: too hot, bursting at its seams, rattling with kinetic energy.

The Maryland-born singer-songwriter has a voice that often sounds like it’s straining at its limits, and although he is ostensibly part of a growing indierock revival that’s been taking hold over the past few years – a cosy perennial – there’s nothing particularly comfortable about the songs on this double album. On Marooned, frantic stabs of guitar and drums create queasy unease; opener Cahokia muddles up the catharsis of a great American road song, descending into proggy bedlam. And his lyrics most often drum up anxieties big and small: “Who do you look to when you’re all on your own? ” he asks on Culture. “When all your heroes lost their microphones? ” Freeman broke out with last year’s Burnover , a set of taut story-songs that were at turns witty, delirious and devastating. Freeman’s secret was in his ability to weld that literary streak to loud, bolshy, riff-heavy music that wouldn’t sound…