In the press bio that comes with
the Sadies' 2022 album
Colder Streams, guitarist
Dallas Good declares, "
Colder Streams is, by far, the best record that has ever been made by anyone. Ever." While his tongue was obviously in cheek when he wrote that,
Good would die a few months after the album was completed, and five months before it would be released. If he had an inkling he wouldn't be around to see it delivered to the band's fans (not likely, since he was felled by a coronary ailment discovered only days before his passing), who could blame him for wanting to go out in a blaze of glory? If
Good and his fellow
Sadies (
Dallas' brother
Travis Good on guitar and keyboards,
Sean Dean on bass, and
Mike Belitsky on drums) were striving to make an album that would play like a dazzling, world-shaking triumph, that's not how
Colder Streams turned out, as good as it is. On the other hand, if they wanted to make a record that would sum up what made
the Sadies a truly great band, they could hardly have done better. The group's moody and powerfully atmospheric blend of psychedelia, garage rock, folk-rock, and classic country has rarely come together quite this well, with layers of guitar full of marvelous single-note picking laid over rich chordal shapes, and a subdued but perfectly intuitive rhythm section holding it all together.
Colder Streams suggests psychedelic pop crafted for the first chilly day of autumn, with an evocative beauty that's sweetly sad but as comforting as a warm cup of tea, and there really isn't another North American band that can summon this sort of sound so readily, and to such superb effect. As mournful as they seem on "So Far For So Few" and "Message to Belial," they rock with impressive, muscular force on "Ginger Moon" and "Better Yet." Stylistically, this is very much in the same wheelhouse as previous
Sadies' albums like 2013's
Internal Sounds and 2017's
Northern Passages, but
Colder Streams takes their template and fine tunes it to peak efficiency -- the performances hit just the right marks, the songs are among their most powerful to date, and the production by
Richard Reed Parry offers the right amount of refinement without getting in the way of what these musicians do best, all without robbing the performances of a natural, spontaneous effect. Maybe
Colder Streams isn't quite the best record that has ever been made by anyone, ever. But anyone who manages to make music this effective and capture it for the ages has the right to swagger a bit.
The Sadies created something very special here, and
Dallas Good was rightly proud of this work. ~ Mark Deming
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