Review: Will Bennett & the Tells package small town sorrows as ‘All Your Favorite Songs’

Folk storyteller Emily Scott Robinson burrows through the booze-medicating melancholy of small town life with her aptly-titled “Ghost in Every Town.” It’s a sobering performance that underscores both the budding tragedy and decaying beauty of a way of life nestled between emerald-capped mountain ridges and abandoned highways. Middle America is a rustic place of forgotten tales and peoples forever tormented by the past ⏤ and the misery is generational, running hot and thick in the aftermath of the commercial and political boom of the ’80s. It’s a dusty land woven from burdens and sorrow many can’t quite understand unless they’ve lived it. Chicago four-piece Will Bennett & the Tells situate their second album, All Your Favorite Songs, amidst such colossal wreckage, and through their shiny rock veneer, they cobble together weather-worn, heart-torn conversations on the ache to break state lines, a small town’s gravitational pull, romantic burning-out and the ruin we all leave in our wake. 11 songs feel rather imposing, jostling emotions of anger, misery, apathy and even joy; frontman Will Bennett navigates the ship, and together with his band of merrymen ⏤ of Daniel Martinson (drums), Ethan Kenvarg (bass) and Wilson Brehmer (guitar) ⏤ the band gives the music scene a necessary punch to the throat.

Several years ago, when his father suffered a severe stroke, Bennett returned back his hometown and drove down from his then-homestead in Columbus, Ohio. Weaving through countrysides strewn with farmland, the cityscape glowing in the distance, the songwriter and musician was soon struck with what would become a crucial turning point for his life. Grinnell, Iowa lies roughly 50 miles east of Des Moines, the state’s capital, and contains less than 10,000 people (according to the 2010 census). It is every town, U.S.A. with a blue-collar workforce simply trying to live a decent live and make ends meet. The impetus for the new record’s titular cut sprouted within his bones, and so, within its angst-riddled pages, Bennett stomps his feet around the grounds of Grinnell. “And we talk and we laugh / Like nothing ever happened ‘cause it happened so fast,” he sings, his voice weary and rusted. The blunt truth of reality weighs heavy, yet he still allows for hope to peep through his vocal cords. “So we’ll wait and we’ll see / Picking up the pieces as you get on your feet…”

Bennett is a triumphant and gnarly craftsman. Much of All Your Favorite Songs blossoms from the often grim human existence, and he gives ample time to wallowing in it that never feels uncomfortable. He simply presents the emotionally-wrung truth as he perceives it: life is as brutal as it is beautiful. Red-eyed opener “Rabbitt’s” shuffles down to the local pub for a pint, a desolate musing on the transitory cycles by which we’re all bound. “We’ll scatter off like ashes, throwing caution to the wind / So let’s raise up all our glasses to until we meet again,” he sings. He toasts in resignation, a hopeful gleam rippling in his eye, and then marches on his way to the next stop.