blankslate Is Better Than Ever on Lookout Mountain Charley

Super sick cover art by William Schaff!

According to Denver-based duo blankslate, their new album Lookout Mountain Charley was intended as a "counterpoint" to their first project, the coming-of-age epic Summer on a Salt Flat. Made up of besties Rylee Dunn (guitar, bass, vocals) and Tess Condron (percussion, keys, and backing vocals) the band continues to navigate the perils of young adulthood on their latest, but as slightly wearier and warier twenty-somethings instead of fresh-faced college graduates. Much has changed for blankslate in the three years since they released their debut. Their follow-up album chronicles and reflects on these changes, while also introducing Rylee as blankslate's newly minted lead singer. Lookout Mountain Charley takes blankslate from the Salt Flats of Utah to the elevation of the mountaintops, ushers them from spring/summer to fall/winter (even though they dropped Lookout Mountain Charley in August, it's got a distinctly fall/winter vibe), and sees them through a breakup (in more ways than one) into the dawn of a new relationship. While Summer on a Salt Flat looks at the intersection of love and change in the aftermath of a breakup, Lookout Mountain Charley offers a more nuanced perspective on love as an act of transformation. The crux of blankslate's gorgeous sophomore album can be boiled down to a simple phrase: "To be loved is to be changed."**

Leaning into their love of '90s grunge music, blankslate has sharpened their edges on Lookout Mountain Charley. When I interviewed blankslate for Westword right after the release of Summer on a Salt Flat, the band explained how their music aims to combine the energy of punk with the narrative traditions of folk, inspired by early to mid 2000s alternative rock bands like Spoon, Bon Iver, and Cage the Elephant (staple bands from back when they only played cover sets). While this project pulls from the same batch of influences, it expands past their previous indie-folk comfort zone, with an emphasis on punk and grunge elements. As they progress to playing bigger and bigger stages (they've gone from gigging at Snarf's Sandwiches to playing fucking RED ROCKS), it only makes sense to cede some of the gentle intimacy of their previous work for a rowdier, arena-ready voltage that'll reach the nosebleed seats.

In a recent interview for BandWagon Magazine (written by yours truly!), Tess called their genre shift a "chicken or the egg" scenario, where Rylee taking over as vocalist gave the band a punkier sound, while the punk lean to these songs simultaneously shaped Rylee's vocal performance. In my sometimes humble opinion, many "perfect" singers sound boring as fuck. Finely tuned, classically trained, perfect-pitched voices are nice–and utterly devoid of character or emotion. The last thing Denver needs is another indie band fronted by a bland, honey-voiced singer with no point of view. Rylee admits that her voice isn't always necessarily "pretty," but that's what makes it interesting. Learning to sing pretty much in real time as they recorded the album allowed Rylee a greater freedom to experiment with her vocal range; across the album she alternates between heavenly falsetto, her natural voice, a spoken word inflection, and full on adrenaline-fueled screams.

Overall, they're embracing a grittier sound, taking the techniques they've grown used to while playing their more indie pop tunes and making them "dirtier." Fuzzed-up vocals and basslines, distorted guitar riffs, and Tess's thundering drums dominate the soundscape, but sweeping orchestral arrangements (dreamy strings courtesy of iZCALLi's Ana Luna Uribe and Josh Lee, and Daymoon Studios's Tyler Imbrogno, who also produced/mixed/mastered the project) and delicate flute accents from Elli Makinen add a dimension of levity and romance. Lookout Mountain Charley is lovingly embellished with contributions from several other vocalists and instrumentalists, but I have to say Bex Heller and Lucas Makinen's glorious trumpeting on "Nov. 16 (Paper Ducks)" is my favorite touch. Horns just sound like a celebration, and their emergence towards the end of the track completely lifts the mood, reframing the whole song as a declaration of love.

There are still quieter emo-folk moments reminiscent of early 2000s indie rockers like Bright Eyes and Okkervil River (fun fact: William Schaff, the artist who created the arresting cover art for Lookout Mountain Charley, has also done album art for Okkervil River), and even a foray into country folk courtesy of the twangy slide guitar on "Bookshelf". And of course there's the epic three-part ballad,"Oh, Monolith," because as Tess said during blankslate's album release show, "It would not be a blankslate show without a three-part song." (I still consider "a fragile thing," the three-part reprise ending from their debut album, to be one of the most moving songs I've heard.)"Oh Monolith," inspired by Tess and Rylee watching 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time, unfolds like a space exploration: The minimal intro mimics the empty splendor of space, with the trepidatious opening notes like hesitant first steps into the abyss, ending in a collision of wailing strings and guitars. This is a perfect example of why blankslate is able to get away with eight-minute songs. They have a sophisticated understanding of how to structure a narrative through sound, using ebbs and flows of energy and tempo.

As blankslate's de facto lyricist since the beginning (she and Tess collaborate on the instrumental compositions), the fact that Rylee is finally the one singing her own words is likely what gives her voice so much power. Rylee's emotionally devastating lyricism is not for the faint of heart. On Lookout Mountain Charley, she unravels a tangle of interconnected themes: getting lost and coming home, loneliness (explored through the metaphor of space travel on "Oh Monolith," "Bookshelf," and "Luck."), fear, mortality, and the ache of letting go. Blankslate has said that they don't really have love songs in their catalogue, but I disagree. Though they're balanced with bittersweet farewells, this project has some of the most romantic lines I've heard in a long time (although maybe I just have a low bar for romance). You're telling me "I wasn't living til you took my hand/Darling I was only killing time," (from "Nov. 16 (Paper Ducks)") doesn't sound like love to you?? Knowing Tess and Rylee, I have to assume this line is an intentional reference to Radiohead's "True Love Waits," which says "I'm not living/I'm just killing time." The outro of "Spare Parts" also seems to allude to "True Love Waits," with the increasingly anguished repetition of "Don't leave, don't stay" echoing the refrain "Don't leave" found throughout the Radiohead classic. And of course, "Johnny Greenwood" is a direct mention of the Radiohead multi-instrumentalist.

Maybe I'm biased, but I feel that Rylee's background as a writer (she's a fellow journalist) is why I'm so drawn to her lyrics. Rylee writes songs like she loves words just as much as she loves music. Please put "Cause I was just a joke/A calculated fool/An unfamiliar malcontent who skirted all the rules" (from "Spare Parts") on my tombstone, ok? "the waning days of my empire" speaks to anyone guilty of holding on too tightly, and hits differently as I'm days away from turning thirty. "Luck" mines the mundane for gilded snapshots of daily life, like, "There are checks to be written/Mom's debts to be paid/Broken windows I should probably replace." I admit that the two lead singles ("Nov. 16 (Paper Ducks)" and "Spare Parts") are still my favorite tracks because of their lyrics, but I've grown quite fond of every song as I've continued to listen, finding gut-wrenching, heart-piercing lines in every one. Continuing the tradition of ending their albums with a sort of reprise that nods to the rest of the songs, the final track "mountain charley" was written just days before the album was finalized (after two and a half years of working on it, mind you) to neatly tie up all of the album's thematic threads. A blankslate project is like a collection of short stories, expertly pulled together by a final appendix. That's some good fucking writing.

Blankslate has always been about transformation. Summer on a Salt Flat captured a portrait of youth (specifically queer youth) on the precipice of adulthood, and Lookout Mountain Charley is centered around another period of transition: the band's limbo of going from a trio, to a duo, to a trio, then back to a duo. Playing off the cyclical nature of endings and beginnings, this album approaches change through the lens of the band's own bumpy trajectory, often using seasonal imagery to illustrate the passage of time. Several songs address the making and breaking of blankslate, but none as clearly as "waning days of my empire." Written on the New Year's Eve leading into 2024, the song expresses the duo's anxieties that their then-trio's demise was on the horizon (their intuition proved correct). There are so many symbolic levels to the phrase "waning days." It refers not just to the beginning of the end of blankslate as a trio, but also to the disappearing hours of daylight as summer moves into fall. Shown in the lines "Don't rush this/I'm beginning to fear/The ending of our long summer," "summer" stands in for any time of prosperity–while also playfully hinting at the band's move away from their debut album.

Fittingly, I got my first taste of Lookout Mountain Charley during KnightLocke Productions's Heartache Cabaret show back in February. Like sensing the onset of a thunderstorm, I could tell from those unreleased songs alone that this album was going to wreck me. And it has, wonderfully. I know better than to say that blankslate has reached their final form, but I can confidently say this is their best evolution yet.

Lookout Mountain Charley is available now on all music platforms. And if you haven't seen them live yet, you can't miss blankslate performing selections from Lookout Mountain Charley (fresh off their first international tour!) Friday, September 12 at Denver's Black Buzzard. Tickets are available online for $23, so I'll see you there–and bring me extra tissues.

**This earth-shattering quote really came from 2023 Twitter???