Deer Tick Bring the Coin-O-Matic Tour to The Kessler
Providence history, neighborhood mythology and the consequences of getting older shape Deer Tick’s ninth album.
– JAMBALOO EDITORIAL TEAM
In Providence, it belonged to a cigarette-vending-machine company whose office was also used as the headquarters of New England crime boss Raymond Patriarca. It is the kind of local detail that sits somewhere between history, family folklore and something people were probably advised not to ask too many questions about.
Deer Tick borrow that name for their ninth album and the tour bringing them to The Kessler Theater on Sunday, October 18, with special guest Presley Haile.
The record looks closely at the Rhode Island that shaped John McCauley, Ian O’Neil, Dennis Ryan and Christopher Ryan. Working-class families, Irish-Catholic guilt, neighborhood criminals and disappearing landmarks move through songs concerned with the difference between remembering home and understanding what really happened there.
The geography may be specific, but the damage travels well.
Across Coin-O-Matic, Deer Tick write about inherited mistakes, complicated loyalties and people discovering that leaving a place does not always remove its influence. Addresses, family stories and old warnings become part of the album’s map, each one carrying more emotional weight than nostalgia usually admits.
The record is also the first Deer Tick have produced entirely themselves.
Recorded at the band’s home studio, the sessions allowed the group to move beyond the loose, four-people-in-a-room approach often associated with their music. Organ, baritone saxophone and other textures appear around the familiar collision of folk, country and ragged rock and roll, expanding the songs without cleaning them up.
That distinction is important.
Deer Tick have always sounded most convincing when the music feels capable of coming apart. McCauley’s voice strains against guitars, piano and drums that bend without completely losing control. On Coin-O-Matic, that instability feels deliberate rather than reckless.
The band know exactly how much damage a song can hold.
More than twenty years into their career, Deer Tick can now place the frayed folk of War Elephant beside the barroom release of Divine Providence and the more reflective writing of their recent work. The older songs carry the urgency of people making mistakes in real time. The newer material understands what happens once those mistakes become part of the family history.
The Kessler should keep both sides close.
Its intimate room will leave little distance between McCauley’s quieter writing and the audience, while the full band can still push the louder material toward the edge of collapse.
Presley Haile opens the evening before Deer Tick bring Providence to Oak Cliff: Catholic families, compromised memories and people still attempting to make peace with the place that made them.
Coin-O-Matic is not a sentimental record about going home.
It understands that home usually remembers a different version of the story.
