“I was working as a bartender in south Minneapolis a few blocks from 38th and Chicago [now renamed George Floyd Square] during the years we made this record, watching a fascist regime take hold. We scrubbed a fair bit of hate graffiti out of the bathrooms during those years,” recalls The Stress Of Her Regard vocalist/guitarist/lyricist Ciaran Daly. “What was weird was that almost no one seemed to be addressing this in music. The songs on this album are very much a response to what was going on at the time.”
Hunkered down inside the studio with iconic producer Ed Ackerson (The Jayhawks, The Wallflowers, The Replacements, Mason Jennings), who tragically passed away from pancreatic cancer during the making of the record, Ed and the indie-rock trio discussed the slow rolling environmental and political catastrophe in the world outside. The result is The Stress Of Her Regard’s self-titled album, out November 19, 2021, a raw-ish indie-rock offering frothing over with pointed political commentary and playful literature references.
The Stress Of Her Regard pen sharp-hooked indie rock lavished with squealing guitar feedback, burly riffs, thick rubbery basslines, and crisply driving drums. The group counts the work of The Jesus & Mary Chain, the Dandy Warhols, Johnny Cash, and Jim Jarmusch as foundational influences. The trio also includes Ciaran’s brother, Criostoir Daly, on bass, and drummer and vocalist Eric Wilson. The band came together after the demise of the Daly brother’s former band, The Idle Hands. The pair found their drummer while Ciaran was complaining to Eric, a bar regular, about the duo’s drummer situation. Eric volunteered to play for them—he had learned to play drums for his solo record—and the pair found in him a gifted multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter. Together, the band issued its debut EP, Sport Marriage, in 2015.
The guys pinched their band name from the historical fantasy novel The Stress Of Her Regard by Tim Powers. Fittingly, the trio’s musical world is rife with literate references and intriguing vocabulary. For example, the title of the album’s featured single, “Callipygian,” comes up in google meaning “having well-shaped buttocks.” “I don’t have a literature degree, but I try hard to make it obvious that I paid attention to the Shakespeare portion of high school,” Ciaran says with a good-natured laugh.
For The Stress Of Her Regard, the band opted for a live-band-on-the-floor recording aesthetic with visceral punk rock song structures. “First day of recording Ed asked us how rough we wanted this to be, and we were vehemently in the camp of ‘as raw as possible,’ and then our natural tendencies took over a bit,” Ciaran says, trailing off with a chuckle.
The album does feature an impactfully lean guitar, bass, drums, and lead and backing vocals, for the most part. “Then, once it was just Ed and I in the studio, we went a bit crazy,” Ciaran admits. “The vocals became the Mormon Tabernacle Choir with me singing everything.” Ed passed away during the making of the record, and his good friend and longtime engineer Kristopher Johnson took over wrapping up The Stress Of Her Regard. “We found things like vocal presets he'd borrowed from KJ as we worked. He was still there,” says Ciaran.
Forthcoming single, Callipygian, opens with shards of feedback and a gorgeous lead guitar melody that collapses into a scruffy and noisy indie gem that recalls the heyday of 1990s slacker-rock like Pavement, Sebadoh, and Guided By Voices. The lyrics brim with barbed wit, including the opening lines:
You always used to drive the most hideous cars/And I think I finally figured it out/Why you’re living alone/Driving your Bugsy Malone/And reading your cat your horoscope.
There is also a seething sensuality that courses through Ciaran’s singing and his words with passages such as:
You shouldn’t be suspicious/Babe I found you delicious/But you never were a friend of mine/Not a friend of mine/You’re just a Callipygian.
“The song is really about looking back on a relationship, and the accretion of detail of a person’s nature, ruing that you didn’t see the red flags, and also implicating yourself because you should have known better,” Ciaran shares.
