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Give today. Hold power to account.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThe Bar Near Where Jeff Lives,\u201d the first track on Stoner Control\u2019s new album, The Bottom of a Hill You Know<\/i>, is the kind of song anyone who\u2019s lived in one place for long enough can connect with. <\/p>\n The album is a catalog of close friends who have moved away and beloved neighborhood establishments that have closed since the Portland power-pop band formed in 2013. Though singer-songwriter and guitarist Charley Williams says it comes off as an \u201caccidental gentrification song,\u201d he insists its theme is broader: \u201cI wanted to talk more about appreciating things, because things change so quickly.\u201d <\/p>\n That\u2019s especially true in Portland\u2019s music scene. The Bottom of a Hill You Know<\/i>, out this Friday, is the band\u2019s first album to feature songs written post-COVID following a live music apocalypse and subsequent rebirth that\u2019s spawned countless new bands. The post-pandemic music scene has by now fully embraced the loud, hooky rock sound Stoner Control has been playing since Portland\u2019s post-\u201900s folk hangover.<\/p>\n Stoner Control\u2019s sound has stayed sturdy throughout this time. \u201cWe try to do loud-guitar, kind of poppish music,\u201d Williams says. \u201cBut these arrangements are a little more straightforward than the last record. The trajectory of this band has gone from very punk to more like pop punk to more straight-ahead rock \u2019n\u2019 roll.\u201d<\/p>\n The Bottom of a Hill You Know<\/i> feels like a back-to-basics album, even if Stoner Control has never strayed especially far from the basics. The band started in 2013, but their roots go back to 2006, when co-frontman and bassist Sam Greenspan and drummer Michael Cathcart formed a duo called the Greencarts at a time when Greenspan says \u201ctwo-pieces were super cool.\u201d<\/p>\n The songs on The Bottom of a Hill You Know<\/i> were winnowed down from a much larger stockpile of post-COVID songs. At 11 tracks, it\u2019s a sprawler compared to the band\u2019s typically bite-sized releases. <\/p>\n Some of those songs ended up on Glad You Made It<\/i> and Smoke in the Valley<\/i>, two interstitial EPs recorded with producer Matt Thomson just to \u201cget some songs out of the way,\u201d according to Williams. \u201cWe were still practicing and Sam and I just kept on writing newer songs. We kept on pushing it back because we were like, oh, we got new songs, we don\u2019t want to record those, so they just piled up.\u201d<\/p>\n When establishing the final curation for The Bottom of a Hill You Know<\/i>, the idea was less to focus on an overarching theme than to \u201cpick 11 songs that we think are good,\u201d Williams says, out of the dozens in the pile. <\/p>\n Yet a theme shines through anyway: the precariousness of living in a place that\u2019s constantly changing around you. It\u2019s a bit of a shock to realize, for example, that Echo Echo, the studio in which the band recorded \u201cThe Bar Near Where Jeff Lives,\u201d has since shut down.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m really grateful we got to one of the last things that came out of that,\u201d Williams says. \u201cThat\u2019s another example of what that song\u2019s about. We should make sure we value these spaces, because they might not be there forever.\u201d<\/p>\n SEE IT:<\/b> Stoner Control album release show with Shawna Pair and Stomach Sleeper at Swan Dive, 727 Grand Ave., swandiveportland.com<\/a>. 8 pm Saturday, Dec. 20. $12. 21+.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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