The Minus 5 – Oar On, Penelope (Yep Roc) (13th Floor Album Review)
If the end of the world had a jukebox, The Minus 5 would be the house band, playing literate songs loudly, and barely holding it together in the way only seasoned musicians can do well. Their latest release, Oar On, Penelope, is a full-throttle collage of garage rock squall, surreal Americana, and barbed-wire wit.
It charges out of the gate, piling power pop hooks, lyrical riddles, and splintered mythologies into a breakneck rush as if trying to beat an oncoming flood.
Led by Scott McCaughey, of Young Fresh Fellows fame and long-time R.E.M. collaborator, The Minus 5 has always been a shape-shifting collective. Since their formation in 1993, the project has seen contributions from a who’s who of alternative rock: Peter Buck, Jeff Tweedy, among others. Across more than a dozen albums, the band has made a name for itself with records packed with lyrical puzzles and stylistic detours. Oar On, Penelope continues that tradition.
The album title itself, Oar On, Penelope, is lifted from the opening track Words and Birds and is a surreal invocation of the mythic Penelope of Homer’s Odyssey. That Penelope was a figure of loyalty, patience, and clever resistance, and here she is cast as a symbol of persistence in a disorienting world. As such, she becomes a spiritual lodestar encouraging us to hold steady and keep rowing no matter how weird the voyage gets. It’s a fitting metaphor for an album released in a time when the cultural tide is strange and unpredictable.
Musically, Words and Birds bursts in on a wave of drums and jangling guitars, a high-energy power pop rush that immediately recalls Big Star or early R.E.M. “Messengers that bring inexplicable songs,” McCaughey declares, summing up his own mission in surreal lyricism.
From there, the album rarely takes a breath. Death the Bludgeoner is a fuzz-drenched, full throttle onslaught, with a comic book vision of Death as a woman in a hurry, wreaking havoc in iambic couplets. “Dig deep,” urges the chorus, just before it barrels into another squall of feedback and drums. It is theatrical, absurd, and uncomfortably timely.
The more reflective Let the Rope Hold, Cassie Lee dips into nostalgic psychedelia. Over buzzing guitars and submerged vocals, McCaughey intones images of beaches, harpoons, and memory’s eroding shoreline. The accompanying video is a slideshow of forgotten album covers and acts as a meta nod to the band’s long history of championing the obscure.
I Don’t Want to Hate Anything is chiming guitars and whole hearted choruses. It contains the most direct emotional statement on the record, with McCaughey confessing: “I don’t want to hate me anymore” over a sweetly sour melody that recalls The Replacements.
The Garden of Arden is a gnarly, bass line driven, garage rock stomp that plays like a heavy, strange, and psychedelic love letter, “She colorizes all of my dreams, a golden voice from a silver machine.” That machine may well be a nod to legendary UK space-rockers Hawkwind.
Last Hotel is classic Minus 5 power pop with cryptic details such as ravens, Christmas catalogues, and wounded penguins. A few bass notes usher us in, and we are back in McCaughey’s crooked, end of world, new wave cabaret.
With Bison Queen, things take a turn for the dreamlike. This slow, floating Americana piece could sit comfortably alongside Neil Young‘s more abstract storytelling. Its mythical lyrical landscape of ghost towns, broken Hoovers, and cryptic heroines sits alongside current issues: “Lay me down or suit me up, she dares to give us healthcare.”
Falling Like Jets and Burgundy Suit bring a roaring urgency. The former is a spiralling panic attack in song form, with the contradiction of a chorus insisting “Nothing is broken,” even as everything appears to be falling apart. Musically it is full of glam rock joy and repetition; it plays like someone talking themselves out of the darkness.
Blow in My Bag is surreal, suffocating, and slyly hilarious, as is the “blink and you miss someone” video with indie musicians and heroes, which underscores the track’s place as a chaotic mission statement for the band’s mad, sharp, and unbothered journey.
The final two tracks deepen the vision. Sharktooth is a slow-burn, psych-tinged reflection on memory and mystical tokens, like something by a cosmic Giant Sand. And We Shall Not Be Released closes the record with ironic grandeur, a riff on Bob Dylan that flips liberation on its head. “I am not becoming / disciple, wolf or priest,” McCaughey sings as he refuses to be boxed in by genre, by expectation, or by time.
Oar On, Penelope, is funny, tuneful, and cryptic. Across twelve shape-shifting songs, The Minus 5 stitch together power pop, garage rock, glam, and more, into a vivid, unbroken hallucination. Holding Penelope’s oar, they row against the cultural tide, steering toward some strange salvation, providing an ark of noise, wit and chaotic defiance built to survive the modern flood.
John Bradbury
Oar On, Penelope is due for release on Friday, May 30th on Yep Roc Records.
Click here to watch the 13th Floor MusicTalk Interview with The Minus 5’s Scott McCaughey
