In the store
Meet Me at the Rocket, the first release from the Columbia, South Carolina, band Cubs, opens like a classic rock and roll record. Drummer Jess Oliver sets a steady four-on-the-snare pattern. Over it, Chris Gardner and Evan Simmons keep a tight eighth-note groove on bass and piano. Four bars in, as Simmons holds a sky-scraping organ chord, Joe Chang cranks the amplifier for spiky and sparkling open chords straight out of the Buddy Holly playbook. As the song surges to a crest, Chang delivers a barrel-chested declaration: “I’ve got a one-track heart,” he croons, “and it’s coming after you.”
That Meet Me at the Rocket opens with such confidence—swagger, even—is unsurprising. The quartet comprises well-established veterans from anchor cities in the Southeast’s fertile music scene—Chang most notably in Asheville and Charleston; Oliver, Gardner, and Simmons, in Columbia. The record’s seven songs were culled from demos that spilled out of Chang in a friend’s spare bedroom in the summer of 2024, not long after he moved to Columbia. They were the result of a series of open-ended songwriting exercises aimed at breaking away from his long-held practice of crafting structured narrative and letting images develop in organic (and sometimes oblique) ways.
The band rearranged and expanded upon Chang’s demos, imbuing each song with a relaxed energy. “Down to the Wire” rages against the dying of the light, kicking against dead-end roads and dead-end jobs in an attempt to escape the gravity of the path not chosen. “Strike a Fire” crackles with fight-song vigor, overdriven guitars and shambolic shuffle undergirding rallying cries against encroaching darkness. The midtempo “Bottle Rockets” throws off sparks: its squealing, feedback-drenched solo hints at the titular explosives; the swaying bridge that follows, buoyed by bouncing, barrelhouse piano, floats like smoke dissipating into the ether.
But Cubs ain’t a one-trick pony or one-hit wonder, as Chang quips in “Down to the Wire,” and Meet Me at the Rocket balances its ballast by casting a wide sonic net. “Face in the Crowd” trades in dark, moody synths not too far removed from White Trash Heroes-era Archers of Loaf. “Elvis Exit” is indebted to New Order and new wave, shot through with flanged guitars, percolating synth patterns, and peaking drum machines. Ambient pads and shimmering electric guitars float under the shuffling ballad “Lay of the Land,” underscoring the song’s plaintive character sketches. Album closer “Gravity” hits on all of the above cylinders, counterbalancing its delicate piano arpeggios and jangle-pop jitters with gnarled fuzz bass and searing synthesizer and guitar leads.
Meet Me at the Rocket is awash in these kinds of small, cinematic details that bolster sweeping sentiments, and such lavish attention is a testament to Cubs’s egalitarian approach. But Chang remains the band’s point of balance. He writes with a tradesman’s hand and an essayist’s eye, his sharp poetry creating full characters out of sketched caricatures—the dispossessed dropouts in “Lay of the Land,” the lost souls in “Face in the Crowd,” the divorcees in “Gravity,” the lovestruck Don Quixote narrating “Down to the Wire”—and turning quotidian observations into resonating metaphors via winsome wordplay. This is rustic songwriter melancholia treading both heartland and heady Southern ivy, blurring the lines between desperation and redemption and bristling with bonfire bravado.
Tracks
- Down to the Wire
- Bottle Rockets
- Face in the Crowd
- Lay of the Land
- Strike a Fire
- Elvis Exit
- Gravity